When making the backpack that some of you have seen elsewhere, I tried to have the textures stretch over the whole object. My first attempt didn't succeed and I didn't have time to work out the math. Today the proper math popped into my head so I added it to the world mesh generator just to test it. Basically, instead of a single texture covering a single block, I stretch them over 8x8 blocks for testing. A real inventory item will probably be 10x10 or 16x16 or something.
I've wanted to do this for a long time for other reasons, too. Back when I added the fractal "dirt" noise that you guys can play with in the last public version, I used a similar concept to stretch the fractal over a 32x32 area. So the fractal noise doesn't repeat until 32 blocks away. So, similarly, this technique could be used to provide large scale textures for far away with a detail texture overlay coming into view when you get closer. Lots of games do this, technically I can now too. You'll see...
So let's see what these silly things look like while I still have the engine temporarily hacked.
The familiar spawn town castle:
Looks kind of funny.
The trees and some non-repeating textures don't like it much but that's not the point.
The dirt texture actually looks kind of cool stretched. I could imagine layering in a higher res texture on top or something.
Even the water looks particularly nice without such much repeating:
Even though the texture would need to be higher res to support something like this, the cobble magnified 8x really has a nice scale to it:
There's just no way to create that kind of impact with block-constrained textures. Sometime in the future, I may have to play with this further for some new materials.
The real reason this is important is because for small items, the repeating textures just look really horrible. Especially when I get into metal and stuff, having a solid texture like these will let me do some cooler things.
For now they just look a bit silly.