2013-06-26, 12:32 AM
(2013-06-25, 01:41 PM)dmpdesign link Wrote:I have plenty of textures that are already mapped for normal/specular whenever you think you may want to try it, I would be happy to donate test textures for you to try your efforts against....most are tiling as well.
If you crack that barrier, I think it would plant SOM quite near some of the higher end mobile games in quality of output graphics since most of your iphone games and such do not use dynamic lighting, but make great use of scene lighting with normals etc.
There's no real barrier to crack here. Part of implementing shields and other things is drawing the graphics for SOM. So under those circumstances it's trivial to pile on additional effects.
That said. I am not a fan of normal mapping. Combined with LOD it can be effective. But too often its implemented where if you look at something sideways it turns into a tunnel Wile Coyote painted on a wall. At that point the effect does more harm than good. Since SOM is tile based you don't have the luxury of making tiles that must be setup so that they can never be seen from the side.
It's good for subtle textures and impressions, would be great for King's Fields scrawling on walls. Etchings and scratches in armor. But I don't think it should be overused the way Dark Souls does for instance. Unless it is coupled with LOD. And not the automatic geometric LOD that Dark Souls uses to such crappy effect.
At any rate. I don't have any specific conclusions about what to do with what kinds of effects like these. I may even opt to make them more difficult to implement. But the one thing they have in common is you need the "tangent space" data in the vertex buffer for them to work. So that much can be facilitated.
The rest may come down to whether authors are willing to leave their comfort zone or not. I suspect not.