Bump mapping support?

[Smirftsch]

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?

Not really. Many things are still done in Engine, especially lighting. To have some bumpmapping effect I'd need to pass over lighting information to the renderer to even realize it. Not even that it would be still slower then and would require even more performance, it would mean to do a lot of things "manually by hand" which otherwise the GPU and some routines would do almost entirely alone.
Lighting should be done nowadays in GPU, its much faster and to realize things like bumpmapping and realtime shadows (really lighting dependent shadows then) would be way easier.

[GreatEmerald]

That's interesting. Also explains why Unreal uses a lot of CPU but not a lot of GPU power relatively.

[Hellkeeper]

Of course. Games as old as Unreal always packed a large part of their rendering in the engine itself, to be done on CPU. Graphic cards, though not really a novelty by then, were not in everybody's computer, and the software rendering was still an important component. GCs were still expensive, and the most problematic thing was the incompatibility of all the different norms. I remember reading an article explaining that, in the end, the narrowing down of the market to two main competitors (ATI and Nvidia) had the positive effect of forcing two architectures which were then refined to relative stability, while previously everyone made graphic cards, including some people 'who shouldn't have made GC' (dixit the article, I wonder if that was not Carmack talking).

AFAIK, it's only afterwards, in the UT/Q3 generation of games that hardware acceleration became commonplace, leaving more cpu cycles for the AI, physics and so on.

Ah, reminds me of the good old days, playing Q2 and HL insoftware mode.

[hogsy]

Just to clarify bump-mapping / normal-mapping has been in use since 1997, just never very popular due to hardware limitations and such.

[iLikeTheUDK]

Just to clarify bump-mapping / normal-mapping has been in use since 1997, just never very popular due to hardware limitations and such.

What was the first game to use it? Can you please post screenshots?

[hogsy]

I can't right now but the first one that comes to mind is the game Jurassic Park Trespasser.
[url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurassic_Park:_Trespasser#Development[/url]

There were a few others around the time that took advantage of the feature that certain cards offered almost exclusively but again the reason people are unaware of most of these is mainly because the feature was only offered with very specific cards at the time. It has to be noted however contrary to popular belief that techniques such as bump-mapping don't need to be supported by the graphics card to be achived on there as they can in-fact be handled on the CPU instead (there was a cancelled game from around 1999 that was already using shadow-mapping techniques for shadowing a dynamicly lit environment which could be achieved on cards such as the 3dfx Voodoo 3  8-)).

So yeah such techniques have been used in quite a few games in the past but as very little hardware supported such features at the time (and managing such effects on the CPU was very difficult and time consuming) it certainly wasn't too popular and only caught on when there started to be new standards set in place and the hardware support on the graphics card was there to do it.