Battle of the engines continued

[Kaftan Barlast]

Well, normalmapping makes for damn fine eye-candy and I really like that :D

 

 

But could they have used it the same way in FarCry and Hl2, those engines werent built to handle that kind of rendering pressure, were they?

[Noceur]

Well, normalmapping makes for damn fine eye-candy and I really like that :D

 

 

But could they have used it the same way in FarCry and Hl2, those engines werent built to handle that kind of rendering pressure, were they?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

 

Well, to be honest I have no idea.

I believe Far Cry could, as one of the highlights of their engine was the polybump technology. Actually, I've made some indoor maps in the far cry editor using a whole mess of normalmapped surfaces and it doesn't slow the game down.

I hardly think the Doom 3 engine could handle a Far Cry map (outdoors several kilometer thing) with every surface normalmapped very well at all... most indoor maps in Far Cry do have a lot of normalmapping (especially the tech ones). In fact, I haven't seen much of large outdoors levels using the Doom 3 engine at all.

I also feel pretty confident that Source could handle it as well... at least with the same demands on the hardware.

 

Interestingly enough, Thief III has normalmapping (and I do believe most if not all surfaces are normalmapped) PLUS selfshadowing (something you have to enable in the console in Doom 3). Thief III has one of the most impressive shadows and lightning I've seen so far.

 

Anyway, normalmapping certainly is a good thing. I just think you have to be careful not to make certain parts of your model too low-poly, especially where the shape of the contour is important.

Hey btw, have you heard that Source will now support HDR? So now CryEngine's got it, Source's got it... but does the Doom 3 engine have it? (actually, I don't know wether it does or not. I don't think it has, it's certainly not used in the game).

 

EDIT: I just wanted to point out that the rendering part of the engine isn't the whole engine, and stuff like sound engine, scripting, input/output and network code play a large role in how good an engine is. Stuff like that I have NO idea about ^_^; ... something I like about Far Cry though, is the dynamic music. I don't remember what Doom 3 had, but Half-life 2 had triggered music. Walk here, play song. Personally, I think that's last week's way of handling music... if you'll excuse the ultra-nerdy expression.

[213374U]

Have you guys tried The Chronicles of Riddick? I don't know if the game had an engine specifically designed for it, but it looks pretty similar to D3, only it runs much more smoothly. It's no wonder since it's supposed to be an Xbox game.

 

Any thoughts?

[angshuman]

Noceur, I've always wondered this -- As far as maps/environments are concerned, why does bumpmapping have to be dynamic? Most lights are stationary, and therefore, static lighting passes should be able to take care of the Diffuse components. I don't know if Radiosity algorithms could be made to understand normal maps, but then, you could run a separate bumpmapping pass *after* radiosity has done its job, could't you? The problem, of course, would be view-dependent specular highlights, but from what I've seen, not many games use them that often. I also thought Quake III had some pseudo-static way of rendering specular highlights.

 

I've always wondered if it was possible to build a rendering engine for relatively low-spec hardware that would allow budget-minded people to run games beautifully at high resolutions, but at the cost of some dynamism.

 

Angshuman

[Noceur]

Chronicles of Riddick does look, in my opinion, better than Doom 3. I've seen it both on PC and Xbox. This may however be because they've got better design and stuff.

 

angshuman:

 

I'm not a programmer, so much of this is speculation. I do however work with 3D modelling and texturing.

 

I believe the radiosity (or whatever they use, radiosty emulation or similar) in HL2 is for the static lightning of the map. It may affect how the models are lit, but I'm not sure of this.

You could use bumpmaps for the rendering of the specifically lit textures on the map. Far cry does a similar things, it makes shadowmaps and lightmaps so the shadows for trees and other static objects won't have to be calculated realtime. (actually, that's what most games do)

 

Radiosity, i.e the real radiosity affects bumpmaps and normalmaps. It calculates light bouncing off surfaces, you see. Normalmaps are just a map where the pixels represent the normals of polygons. So radiosity would indeed affect normalmaps.

 

The reason you'd want static objects have realtime calculated bumpmaps (and normalmaps) is because of non-static lights I believe. Also, bumpmaps and normalmaps (normalmaps in particular) allows for specular lightning.

 

All in all, I believe you've just answered the question why HL2 and Far Cry don't have everything on-screen ultra-bumpmapped and normalmapped. All of a sudden you can run the games and lower-end hardware.

 

"I also thought Quake III had some pseudo-static way of rendering specular highlights." I think I read somewhere that Carmack had made some algorithm to better shade a two-triangle surface. I do believe that's why we need per-pixel lightning... specular lights, as you said.

 

To answer your question, you could just have the textures "baked" to the lights of the map (as I mentioned above). But then, if you made a map entirely with a brick texture but with different lighting for different rooms, you'd have the same texture baked for every room and surface. That's more texture memory than it'd take to have the texture normalmapped/bumpmapped, but less (I presume) for the GPU to handle.