Bump mapping support?

[hell]

Is there gonna be bump mapping support and shadowing support for unreal on higher end PC's with gfx cards i.e. geforce 6600+ ?

[Smirftsch]

not in the near future. Although bump mapping may be not that difficult to implement, it requires still time I currently don't have.
Realtime shadows are way more complex than that and thus would require even more time.
Although both are long wanted dreams of maybe all of us, it needs to wait until Unreal 227 reaches final state and I have time to concentrate on such things.

[GreatEmerald]

Real time shadows... That would make Skaarj really spooky, like at Vandora ruins standing in front of a light.
What about footsteps? They were promised some time earlier...

[Smirftsch]

footstepsounds and footprints are implemented and fully working in 227 already. Just need some changes in texture properties. Read the 227 new features topic for details.

[GreatEmerald]

Yes, but not quite a huge explanation on how to do that :\ And any way to do that in Linux?

[Smirftsch]

I was able to realize a lot of things in Linux yet, but no UED support. So no, you can't add it in Linux. But once you have a modified texture package, it works in Linux as well.
Dots was working on a mutator for that and I want to talk with DieHard later to maybe implement it into the URP.

[sopa_de_letras]

Pray for Epics to make UE GPL like Quake, then anybody could bring quake engine ports features to UE.

However from what I've seen in quake community, coders focus on openGL alone, nobody cares about map format or system memory management.

[GreatEmerald]

It's not Epic style to do that. They will keep U1 non-oss (OSS - Open Source Software) while they can distribute it in other packages, like Unreal Anthology.

[Skull Doctor]

haha speaking of realtime shadows and quake, it reminded me or lordhavoc's darkplaces engine for quake, which has amazing real-time shadow effects. You can see the outline of anything, including enemies and your player moving around on the wall.

[Turboman.]

Since we're on the subject of shadows, Are there already any plans for what kind of technique is possibly going to be implented in the future?

is it going to be the (shitty, needs to die!) projector/texture shadow method like in ut2004?
or is it going to be the far more sophisticated stencil method (creative's shadow patch for example)?

[Mini-Me]

Smirftsch is pretty much my hero for even considering these things for Unreal 98.

The cool thing about fancy texture mapping techniques (bump mapping, parallax mapping, and relief mapping) is that once you have the rendering infrastructure written (shaders operating with access to the tangent space matrix and the appropriate normal and/or depth texture maps), it doesn't take much more shader code to implement the more advanced techniques over the basic ones.

Since we're on the subject of shadows, Are there already any plans for what kind of technique is possibly going to be implented in the future?

is it going to be the (crappy, needs to die!) projector/texture shadow method like in ut2004?
or is it going to be the far more sophisticated stencil method (creative's shadow patch for example)?

Technically speaking, stencil shadows (shadow volumes) are beginning to become the way of the past, since they don't scale very well with geometric complexity (not an issue for Unreal, granted), only geometry can cast shadows, and it's difficult to implement soft shadows with them (there is the penumbra wedges method, but...).

I'm not sure exactly what methods UT2004 uses (from what I remember, the Unreal engine 2.0 uses several types of shadows), but shadow maps are looking like the way of the future. One cool thing about them is that anything that can be rendered can cast shadows (i.e. particles, masked textures, etc.). In the past, aliasing artifacts (blockiness mainly) made these pretty ugly, but there are lots of new ways being developed to reduce the aliasing and get accurate shadows...parallel split shadow maps (and variants) are probably the best method: http://appsrv.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~fzhang/pssm_project/, http://appsrv.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~fzhang/pssm_vrcia/
There are also several emerging high-quality soft shadowing algorithms:

• variance shadow maps (http://www.punkuser.net/vsm/)
• percentage closer soft shadows (ftp://download.nvidia.com/developer/pre ... H/PCSS.pdf)
• backprojection (http://www.irit.fr/~Gael.Guennebaud/SoftShadowMapping_egsr06.php)

Here's a cool comparison of various newer techniques: http://developer.download.nvidia.com/presentations/2008/GDC/GDC08_SoftShadowMapping.pdf
I also know that variance shadows maps have been combined with parallel split shadow maps to produce quite nice soft shadows in large environments (http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?p=975976). It's probably possible to combine some other algorithms, as well. There are a lot of other things I'm planning on fooling around with in graphics, but once I get a more complete understanding of PSSM and the backprojection algorithm, I'm curious to figure out if those two are compatible as well.

Some of the soft shadow algorithms (particularly backprojection...eek) are quite expensive and impractical for older hardware (or maybe even current hardware), but that's what's nice about having an Unreal.ini with configurable options

I have no idea what the Unreal engine codebase looks like (or what the current renderer code looks like), but if all things are equal, shadow maps will probably be the best bet for their extensibility.

[sopa_de_letras]

UT2k4 doesn't rely on any shader. On the other hand UT3 has full support for Shader 3.0 and HDRR.

I believe that Crysis is heavy because all shadows and textures are at very high resolution, making any high end video card suffer because there is too much detail to render. With so many multiple texture layers, effects, HDRR, filtering this and that, plus all in a dynamic world... No wonder why GPUs got so many bits, trillions of operations per second, dozens and dozens of units for this and that.

[Wastelander0101]

Actually, there is some kind of fake-bump-mapping that one of the guys posted here. I cant seem to find the link, can anyone do a re-post?

[-Zlodey-]

Actually, there is some kind of fake-bump-mapping that one of the guys posted here. I cant seem to find the link, can anyone do a re-post?

Its not fake, it true bump.
http://boris-vorontsov.narod.ru/download_en.htm - there is render for DeusEx, working with Unreal, UT,TO/etc. too(in TO you may get ban for using it online, in UT - not).
ENB Series working with dx9 render only.

Also there is OpenGL render, heavy, not finished and I not see any updates for it: http://www.oldunreal.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1235632308/60#73

[Hyper]

Do we need bumpmapping ("fake" details) when we can have textures of 4096x4096 or even bigger ("real" details)?

[Hellkeeper]

Do we need bumpmapping ("fake" details) when we can have textures of 4096x4096 or even bigger ("real" details)?

Different things. One can't replace the other.

[GreatEmerald]

Indeed, bumpmaps give us the illusion of 3D, S3TC gives us details.

[-Zlodey-]

Off cource we need it!
Try to set bump on and off in doom3/quake4, and you WILL SEE the difference.
Can hi-resolution texture have dynamic shadow in different direction inside "deep" areas? Well, its basics of modern graphics, you cant made all with hi-detailed models.
Its easy way to add some "3d" into models or maps.

[iLikeTheUDK]

About realtime shadowing, I found out that back in 1998 Creative Labs released a patch for Unreal to add support for realtime shadow mapping - and it actually casted from light sources!
However, this pach only supported version 220 of Unreal and could pnly run on Creative's own S3 Savage 3D Accelerator. And as Epic continued to patch Unreal, Creative's engine modification lost popularity (it wasn't extremely popular in the first place) and became obscure. Ironically, 3 years or so later, Creative approached John D. Carmack, lead programmer of id Software - one of Epic's earliest rivals - while he was developing id Tech 4 (and the game to pioneer it, Doom 3), suggesting a deal for him - He may use their shadowing algorithm, as long as he also implements EAX 3.
So I was thinking, maybe you could try to get the source code for the patch, and look at the parts enabling the realtime shadows. Then you could add it into Unreal 227.
And Unreal 2 also uses light-sourced shadows, so you could probably check its codebase as well.
And Duke Nukem Forever was made using a heavily-modified Unreal Engine 1. And it has normal mapping. If you manage to find how it does the bump mapping, you might also try to add it into the OldUnreal patch. Other options may be Pariah, Tribes: Venegance, and BioShock.

[Smirftsch]

To make it short, as much I'd love to have such things myself, it's not that easy.

Creatives stencil shadows had a lot of flaws and were far from working perfect. Also sources not available.

Unreal2 sources not available: Epics answer: "We don't have the bandwidth to..."

Not Unreal related engines differ to much, would result in the same situation as now- a complete rewrite required.

An implementation of both realtime shadows and bumpmapping makes not much sense at the moment, since the first step would have to be to move the lighting system from the engine into the graphics card. Can it be done? Sure. Can I do it? Not at the moment, not the time, not the health, not the money it would require me to have the needed time.

Sorry. I really would love to have it myself.

[Hellkeeper]

Can it be done? Sure. Can I do it? Not at the moment, not the time, not the health, not the money it would require me to have the needed time.

It's always about you isn't it, don't you care about our feelings ?

[Smirftsch]

I love your refreshing way of seeing things. Nope, actually I'm pure egoist.

[iLikeTheUDK]

Nobody likes egoists...

[Smirftsch]

Nobody likes egoists...

Most of the time I like me

[iLikeTheUDK]

Yup, the only people who like egoists are the egoists themselves...