When working on most types of games, textures are one of the few things that will make or break the game. Though some people don’t mind how detailed a model is and some think it is one of the most important aspects of a game, a texture is something that is unavoidable, and needs to fit the atmosphere of the game that it is in.
For those that don’t know, a texture can be thought of as a “skin” for models. For example, a tree would need a bark texture for the wood and leaf textures for the leaves. Or, a cliffside needs a stony texture to make it look like a cliff.
However, because textures aren’t infinitely large, they need to be placed correctly for them to look natural. One of the biggest issues with textures — particularly ground textures — is having repeating patterns appear. What that means is, at a large enough scale, the textures start to look artificial and, in the worst case, blocky, like a bad MS Paint bucket fill.
There are many ways that this is fixed nowadays. One of the most common is having the textures randomly rotated as they are placed/generated. This very simple trick gets rid of almost all of the repeating patterns over a large scale.
However, sometimes, textures are corrupted and unable to be read correctly. Or other times, the developer missed an area. Even still, it could just be the case that the person/company in charge decided that the area was so secluded that nobody would see the broken texture.
Take a look at the image above. Is that texture missing because they missed it (even though it is visible well within the playable area), or because it failed to render? That missing texture is so apparent that it is tempting to think that it was a corruption and not negligence. Now take a look at the missing texture below.
The root is able to be reached within normal gameplay, or in other words, the player can reach it without having to do anything special. However, that root is fairly out of the way, and the camera needs to be rotated at just the right angle to see it. Because of those two factors, it isn’t too hard to see that it doesn’t have the right texture because they (the developers) decided it didn’t need to be there. Now, one more example.
The texture in this screenshot is obviously corrupted. Something behind the scenes — within the game’s code — went wrong and failed to render that part of the texture correctly. However, without being able to see the code itself, one can only assume the cause of that corruption. Maybe it was memory leaking (the game’s memory being unable to free up memory segments that are no longer needed) or it was an actual error when the texture was being placed.
Whatever the cause, sometimes textures go awry. As with all bugs within the computer world, they will always find a way to appear, whether it was because the developer forgot to add it, or something corrupted in the code.
