2013-06-25, 10:42 AM
(2013-06-25, 07:48 AM)dmpdesign link Wrote:HolyDiver, any chance of bumpmap support in the near future?
ML before you go making higher poly count floor tiles ( I admit they look nice), it would be a good idea to see if SomEx may score you bump/lighting support to pull off the same effect with much less strain on the processing.
Technically yes. The plan is to extend the MDO format so that every third vertex holds skinning data for two vertices.
I originally thought it would be cool to interleave the vertices and skinning data so it would be 1:1 where the extra space would hold bump mapping numbers. But I decided instead it would be better to automatically generate the bump mapping numbers and cache them along with CP files in temporary folders.
None of this interferes with SOM since none of its MDO (and MSM) files are animated. And the bump mapping data is in separate files. The only real upside is you can still open these MDO files up into one of the old Edit tools.
Each vertex is 8 numbers. So a skinning slot is 4 numbers. That's 3 weights where the fourth is 1 minus the other 3. And the fourth number is really 4 bytes that assign the weights to their anchors. Unfortunately it won't be possible to load this format directly into video memory, since it will have to be unpacked (and interleaved with the bump mapping data) but unpacking should be very simple.
This going to be worked on relatively soon, but I haven't thought about how to accommodate the additional textures that would be involved. There is already a way to do that on a per texture basis. But it doesn't tie into the MDO and MSM files. In theory you can pack arbitrary file references into those formats.
Bottom line though SOM won't know anything about this stuff. It will only work with extensions. MDL won't be used anymore for visuals. It will just be an animation format. There might have to be some fallback junk in them for backwards compatibility.