Bump mapping support?

[Hellkeeper]

Achievement unlocked : Signalman.
Derail a thread in one sentence.

[Turboman.]

Then lets put it back on its track!

Bumpmapping is soooooo 2001! we need to stay with the times with dx11 tesselation

[Skywolf]

somehing more simple: can it be done so we can configure the direction in UED of the real time shadows we have right now? this would make the shadows look way more realistic in outdoor areas.

[iLikeTheUDK]

...Wait...

Was bumpmapping used in games already in 2001? I thought the first games to use it were released in 2004 - maybe 2003/2 at the earliest. And did any device except for PCs support it already in this time?

[Turboman.]

...Wait...

Was bumpmapping used in games already in 2001? I thought the first games to use it were released in 2004 - maybe 2003/2 at the earliest. And did any device except for PCs support it already in this time?

Almost all x-box games around then had bumpmapping, probably most noticeable was halo which came around 2001.
On the pc even older games like tomb raider, outcast, battlezone, operation flashpoint, and giants citizen kabuto were among the early adopters.
Most of them were handled in software/CPU or specific Matrox hardware though, and giants required atleast a geforce 256 card.

[iLikeTheUDK]

No offense, but I think you're making the once common mistake that I thought to have passed from the world, of mistaking Bump Mapping to Specular Mapping. If Halo: Combat Evolved had bump mapping, it was probably just for the environment maps. The first game in the Halo series that I know for sure that it had bump mapping and per-pixel lighting was Halo 2. Unreal Engine couldn't have been so outdated...It would surely add Bump Mapping around 2001 if it was common back then. And as far as I know, Halo: CE came out in 2002, not 2001; And that was also the year the Xbox was released in North America. As far as I know, it was only released in 2001 in Japan.

[GreatEmerald]

Hmm, true, bumpmapping was introduced, on the OpenGL side, in version 1.3, which was released in 2001. On the D3D side, it was introduced in D3D6, although I'm not sure when that was released (if with DX6, then it was back in 1998!). And apparently OpenGL was used in Windows before they created D3D, that's something I never knew...

By the way, theoretically you can set up Unreal II to use them in some specific situations, as it allows you to access low-level D3D functionality in Golem Studio. Quite interesting.

[iLikeTheUDK]

D3D6 was released with DX6. But maybe graphics processors were not powerful enough to run it, because if they could, Unreal and Half-Life would have bump mapping naturally implemented as to keep up with modern graphics. And we'll probably be well after the time that game engines started implementing true global illumination in actual real time...and probably most engines would have turbulence simulation by now...

...lol, Turboman, looks like you can probably receive the Signalman "achievement" as well, if there was such achievement...

[Smirftsch]

it can be clearly seen that they wanted to implement it back then, since already the 224 code contained:
UTexture* BumpMap; // Bump map to illuminate this texture with.

Unfortunately it never was implemented then, not in UT, not in 226. Major reason for this was probably the step to UE2 and that they moved on from doing all stuff in the Engine to start doing things in the GPU.

[iLikeTheUDK]

And unfortunately, even if it was seen in later UE2 games, bump mapping was never seen in any game by Epic until the UE3 era. Also, I think Quake 3 was the first game that managed to (sorta) implement normal-mapped bump mapping. And I wonder why didn't Half-Life do it?

[Hellkeeper]

Half-life was a Q2-based engine, with traces of Q1 code in places. Such things were not done without horrible performances until 2005/6, much later.

[iLikeTheUDK]

So you're saying, in other words, that, like I thought, video cards just weren't even half powerful enough to render bump mapping?

[Hellkeeper]

Yes.

[iLikeTheUDK]

Well, kinda sad, since according to Tim Sweeney, CPUs could outrun GPUs, because there's no need to wait until features will be added; They could just be rendered via Software.
...Oh wait, CPUs weren't powerful enough back then as well.
Shame.

[Hellkeeper]

GPUs and CPUs are not interchangeable chips linked to a different set of circuits. A GPU is much more efficient for graphical operations than a CPU, even if it is a bit slower.

[iLikeTheUDK]

Anyway, I think what you could do is somehow make a texture type that uses code for the Phong lighting from WaveTexture and the texture-controlled bump mapping from IceTexture, and also uses a diffuse/specular texture. Then you somehow need to get light direction from lighting in the level (I believe some code that can be used as an example of this is in FadeShadow), and pass it on to the variable controlling the bump map lighting angle in the texture. The result would probably be something like an image-based version of the per-pixel normal mapping that's common in modern games.

[Dozey]

My question is: HOW TO ENABLE BUMP MAPPING?? Give me guys detailed instructions, cause I am dumb in this category...

[Hellkeeper]

Here are the instructions :
1) You can't. To enable it, it must be built in the engine but disabled. Bump mapping has never been part of Unreal Engine 1.

[iLikeTheUDK]

Bump mapping has never been part of Unreal Engine 1.

Actually it might have been or was supposed to be part of Unreal Engine 1. I really hope you came across the Bump Map slot in the texture properties (the one which has the description "Bump map to illuminate the texture with" if you open the texture class in the sript editor). It might be able to prove that some kind of bump-mapped lighting was originally going to be implemented in UE1. To prove it even more - it's pretty obvious what the OmniBumpMap light effect means.

[Hellkeeper]

It might have been a project, but it's not implemented. The discussion about how to use it ends here, pretty much.

[Smirftsch]

No doubt Epic intended to build it in, but indeed it was never done. Problem is, that all lighting and most rendering stuff is done internally yet and not- unlike modern games, in GPU. To implement it is currently not feasible, indeed it would make sense to create an entirely new renderer first which utilizes GPU.

[GreatEmerald]

Hmm? I can understand that not being possible in software. But you do have D3D and OGL renderers, and those have bump-map support (D3D6 had a proprietary one and D3D8 had a regular one; OGL has had it since OGL 1.3). So how come you can't use the functionality there?

[Smirftsch]

oh, it is possible (in theory), still not feasible, not viable in my eyes. It would require a lot of additional work and the result may still not as good as if it would be done via GPU, not mentioning performance here.

[GreatEmerald]

Good to know. And why is it not feasible? Does the code abstract the D3D/OGL functions too much? And what do you mean about GPU acceleration, doesn't the renderer automatically utilise it when those functions are used?

[Hellkeeper]

Good to know. And why is it not feasible?

I wonder if Smirftsch working alone on the rendering code to implement a feature that required entire teams of developpers has something to do with it.
Nah, probably not.