visual effects

[finnbryant]

are you planning any extra texture layers like bump maps, diffusion maps, dirt maps or damage maps? or perhaps more importantly team colour maps?

team colour maps would be monochrome and they would show which parts of the model should contain the team colour, pretty important in fps games to distinguish the enemy.

damage maps could be transparent until the person/vehicle/building is damaged. dirt maps would just get more visible over time. bump maps make models look a lot prettier by giving the appearance of greater detail in the model. diffusion maps would make things more or less shiny.


i dont expect you to add all of these, but a subset would improve the look a lot.

the reason i bring this up now, people are already making textures, if you make a dirt map, for example, they will know to keep the dirt off the basic texture, so decide quickly, before its too late and everyone has to start texturing again.


i suggest adding 4, since a texture has 4 colours (red,green,blue,alpha) and you might as well use a whole one.

[radruin]

It sounds useful, but I have no idea how to do this

[theTroy]

FreeSpace2 engine is open source and has got all of these implemented. Might be worth looking into it /smile.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":)" border="0" alt="smile.gif" />

[the_dare]

thetroy we are using the torque engine! i know that it supports bump maps but im not sure what else!

[finnbryant]

if bump maps are supported, they should be included, then i think team colour maps and dirt maps should be included too.

why? because they should all be relatively easy, team colour is very simple, and dirt is just more opaque as time goes on.

and team colour is really quite important.

[the_dare]

yeah i agree about team colours! we may be able to build dirt maps ect. into the engine if we have time as torque cime with the full source code to modify!

[finnbryant]

cool, sounds like a plan