Random noise on nearby terrain instead of blurry textures - HD without much RAM

[Fifi]

I know that suggesting higher resolution textures is on do not suggest list so I thought of another approach to this problem (well, planets and moons should look nice also from closer distance and from surface, it's sad to land somewhere and see oversized textures around ).

It's a very simple solution - instead of loading high resolution textures into memory, game could just make a random, detailed noise (that could even also easily generate bump map), which will be lost after moving away. It will have the full resolution (as for the viewing distance) and look like a perfect HD image, without increasing CPU and memory load.

And about the higher-distance textures: the biggest ones (land shapes, etc.) could be just a little bigger, so they will look HD while not as high as needed to lost the sight of geographic shapes (well, it won't be much more memory than 3-4 textured parts, so it won't be a problem) and then (at a lower altitude) the point directly below the ship will slowly start being replaced by the procedural terrain and random noise textures.

(of course I don't mean ugly random noise from CRT TV, but properly calculated one, to resemble natural grain)

Also the random rocks, trees, cactuses, grass, etc. could have a HD resolution using this - which, connected with randomization of their shapes and sizes, with decreasing details when the distance to them is bigger (which will cut out lags caused by them), would greatly improve visual side of the game.

Thanks in advance for taking it into consideration.

Edited August 7, 2013 by Fifi

[halosos]

Great idea, I can +1 for this.