The future?

[sopa_de_letras]

Any change of seeing Normal maps, alpha maps or specular in the future? High resolution look great because of the resolution, but they are limited to one direction only, static lights.

Or maybe less complex features like uncap lightmap resolution or add native OpenGL rendering mode to UED?

[Turboman.]

If shaders, customizable shaders are possible future implentation in unreal i see that coming

But up to now texture possibilities are very limited, unreal doesn't allow even any customizable multitexturing support, so you can't add or edit opacity, diffuse, specular maps, the only thing unreal allows you to edit are bitmaps(diffuse) and detailtextures

as for ued, 227 ued already has d3d rendering (the slow,buggy instable d3d6 one from UT),
And opengl is possible too by changing the renderer line in unrealed.ini for each corresponding viewport.
However be warned using opengl or d3d8 in ued might give you very ugly results as those renderers were obviously not finetuned for the editor (you'll get crap like: you can't select surfaces, you can't place items, such kind of bugs).

[fxsr789]

*sits under a tree* Hey look shade, I guess it's a shader!?

I'm bored, but I'd love to see Shaders\Combiners ,etc in Unreal engine 1. Oh wow those bugs yeah I know that, you can't see sprites in the 2-D views either.

- Fenix

[Turboman.]

oh wow, indeed combiners is exactly what i had in mind, i'm pretty sure it couldnt be too hard to implent those either (maybe a feature for... 229? )

what would also be greatly awesome is if we could have procedural textures with limits better then 8-bit 256x256, imagine full blown procedural effects on high res textures.

speaking of that, imagine the water in nyleve falls with realtime reflection (render-to-texture based, not unreal's "mirror" method), the procedural texture being a bumpmap or even a parallax map, you'd have water that rivals that of far-cry  ;D

[sopa_de_letras]

Reflection is hard to do. There is cheaper alternative, Cubemaps as in UT2k.

From the games that I've seen using far cry style reflections, the reflection is very low res and/or has a huge impact on fps. That render to texture seems to only be feasible in either shader 3.0 or Shader 4.0, the last one adding what seems much easier and/or faster processing of that.

[Turboman.]

Reflection is hard to do. There is cheaper alternative, Cubemaps as in UT2k.

From the games that I've seen using far cry style reflections, the reflection is very low res and/or has a huge impact on fps. That render to texture seems to only be feasible in either shader 3.0 or Shader 4.0, the last one adding what seems much easier and/or faster processing of that.

cubemaps... are the gayest thing ever and should die in the fiery pits of hell
seriously, they look totally unconvincing as a mirror effect, despite their performance, they are nothing more then simply a 6-sided dome texture, taken from a specific point, put on a bmeshenviromap=true texture.
the result? cubemaps are impossible to use on large vast bodies of water, the reflections, that are static will simply render the surface from a completely different point, you'd be swimming the waters of bluff near the pier, yet see the tower on the other side in the reflections...

actually now im at it, its not hard to create cubemap-ish effects in current day unreal, all you need is go ingame, use a high fov, take a screen to texture, and place the texture on a sheet mesh.

imo shader model 2.0 is definately the way to go, render to texture gives quite feasable performance, and i mean... farcry is like what... 4 years old? it even gave me good fps on my old pc.

[fxsr789]

cubemaps... are the gayest thing ever and should die in the fiery pits of hell

Lol, you're hilarious sometimes Turboman.

I can imagine reflections like that though. (no not cubemaps)

- Fenix

[sopa_de_letras]

What is the reflection method used in NFSU? It doesn't need shaders, only T&L, and has a configurable "reflection update rate".

[Turboman.]

What is the reflection method used in NFSU? It doesn't need shaders, only T&L, and has a configurable "reflection update rate".

likely its simply a render-to-texture feature, either with some extra programming or something.
also it isn't really a shader model specific feature, alot of features you can go around avoiding shader model, at the cost of performance and alot of extra programming required (hell for that matter, even games like outcast (1999), or tresspasser (1998) had realtime reflections and bumpmapping, and they weren't even hardware accelerated ).

also, UT2004 has render-to-texture abilities aswell, (meaning to some point, true reflections!) at quite a nice performance (so i assume), but even then its also based upon a single point camera, meaning that its useless for large bodies of water.
its kinda like a skyzoneinfo, but then with a texture as a backdrop

[fxsr789]

Holy hell, Outcast? I remember that game, yeah all those effects, not even hardware accelerated either. Unreal needs effects like that game.

- Fenix

[Raven]

limits better then 8-bit 256x256

here's code to create 1024x1024 wet texture in UED2:

Code: Select all

TEXTURE NEW NAME="TextureName" CLASS="class'fire.wavetexture'" GROUP="group" PACKAGE="PackageName" USIZE=1024 VSIZE=1024

and here's list of all procedural textures to paste in CLASS=

Code: Select all

"class'fire.firetexture'"
"class'fire.icetexture'"
"class'fire.wavetexture'"
"class'fire.wettexture'"
"class'engine.scriptedtexture'"

[Turboman.]

wow thats great, many thanks raven! i had no idea that was possible!

wonder what would happen when you use a 24-bit s3tc texture as the source texture for an procedural effect

[Jâçkrâßßit]

wow, someone should make a quick test map using this technique

[fxsr789]

How very interesting..... Thanks for sharing that command Raven, but will it also work with FireTextures?

- Fenix

[Raven]

Yes, but I don't know how it'll act in S3TC package

[BOZO]

Unfortunately it does not matter what size you are trying to define the Procedural Texture to. It will be limited to 256 x 256. (ie: 2^8) This limit is defined by the definition of the variable sizes used. Here is a previous post where I was discussing this.

[url]http://www.oldunreal.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1109875901/26#26[/url]

What you will find is that the texture can be created larger but the active portion where any effects show up will be limited to a 256 x 256 region on that texture.  

I was able to take Procedural Textures that were originally defined as smaller than 256 x 256 and hex edit them so they were changed to 256 x 256. I have plans to eventually create a program that will automatically perform all of the necessary binary changes to make this happen so we can provide for updated procedural textures as part of the S3TC project.

The only way to change this size limitation would be to modify the native code significantly and also perform the necessary binary changes to all of the Procedural Texture definitions in parallel. Needless to say - this would be an extensive project. Since I have no native code access, this is not on the top of my list of items to tackle at the moment.