hi all,

i once found the website of 4druler's amp II engine, but didn't look deeper into the engine, now, as i had a look at it again, i remarked a nice little effect, a "fake" specular normal mapping shader.

first a screenshot:


it doesn't look bad (ignore the resolution and jpeg artifacts...). i want you to have a closer look at the highlight. it is... a transparent bitmap that moves according to the player's and to the light's position. the texture itself is normal mapped and has obviously a spec map, as the transparent bitmap isn't visible all over the surface.

a small video sequence can be found on http://www.caffier.net/download/amp2effect.avi (divX 5 codec).

why would i want such a "lame" effect: well, if you don't look too close and have stuctured textures, it is not visible at all, plus i gained framerates beyond 300.

could anyone code this? i'd love to see it in GS.

maybe i sould add a small drawing:

This shouldn't be too difficult to make and yeah the effect is pretty effective for the extremely small amount of fps it seems to consume.

Perhaps the wiki shader for the moving light on a wall may give some hints on how to accomplish this? It's worth checking out.

Cheers

I am playing every day 4DRulers Gore. The game is very old and full of effects and still the best multiplayer 3D shooter I know. Better as CounterStrike and better as Quake or Unreal

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i remarked a nice little effect, a "fake" specular normal mapping shader.

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I think you are mistaken, as the Amp2 demo had real specular normal mapping, done in OpenGl using fragment shaders/register combiners.

This is not a hack, and uses essentially the same methods we use for normal mapping in A6.

The reason it may not look as good as say the normal mapping in Sphere is that it uses many shortcuts for older hardware, such as lookup textures for normalization, and diffuse and specular falloff. This creates the noiceable artifacts in the specular highlight.

But it is not fake... the method you propse wouldnt really work i think (or rather, could be done in a different way, but then it would be some kind of image-based lighting, which is only useful for rendering many specular highlights for multiple lights).

wouldnt it be possible to program a .dll to get this effect or something similar? That would indeed a really nice feature to have that in 3dgs.

There are already normal mapping shaders for A6... no need for a dll.

there are some, but they're all fps consuming, i thought this idea would really speed up the rendering with little quality loss.

@matt or any other shader expert: would it be difficult to code this? would someone be interested in and have the time to create such a piece of code?

Im not sure what you mean.. code what?

Normal mapping has been working for a long time in A6, and its not slow at all.