[Nuke]

the map system gets kinda confusing and everything. is there any way we can add support for a new texture format? that way we can use different channels for the maps. instead of using several indexed color maps, we could use a format with 6 channels, 5 bits a channel. rgb takes 15 bits, 5 for transparancy, 5 for specular maping, and 5 for glow mapping, taking 30 bits. we could then have 2 bitflags to play with. one could take the place of 0'255'0 (the green nodraw color), and another for say reflectance (mirroring). new converters would need to be created, but it could be usefull. i personally dont like being confined to 256 colors.

this texture format gives 25 shades of each color, 25 glow levels, 25 levels of transparency, 25 levels of reflectance, plus two bitflags. a photoshop pluggin could be written to save to the new format. i dont know if that works with freespace though.

[Taristin]

too complicated


-shine

and

-glow are good for me.

[Flipside]

Also, it already supports DirectX surfaces, which are more compact than PCX files and, I think, they support alpha layers, so you can include shine and glow in there? Not sure exactly how they work, but they are there

Flipside

[Taristin]

Do you change your siggy every post?

[Bobboau]

were thinking about implementing a materials system that will alow you to set up the texture stageing you're sleves, useing any texture you like in any way, this means you could for example implement detail mapping, or do glow mapping or shine mapping in a diferent way.

perhaps I should think about useing ani as an alternate form of textureing, would want to give it a diferen't extention though, this would however make animation of textures imposable, but for the models you texture in this way I supose it would be a fare tade off

[Flipside]

Originally posted by Raa Tor'h
Do you change your siggy every post?

You mean me? I've only ever changed it twice since 2001, I had a different one for about three weeks then changed it to this about a week ago Not that it helps any cos SectorGame is down till next month

As for the texture staging, sounds great, specially with bump/shine and glow mapping on large cruisers etc I'm not very up with GFX programming, but would each 'effect' take a texture stage, and so limit us to two usually?


Flipside

[Bobboau]

the materials code I am thinking of would alow you to have some absurdly high (lets say ten) passes, each one with the maxmum of 8 texture stages (most  cards only alow two texture stages, but there are other things you can do), you would be givven acces to defuse and specular light, several options on UV coordanants (for example lighting, like I did in the cell shadeing, or environment mapping, maybe have scaleing options), and you would have acces to all operations, like adding, multiplying, ect..

[Fry_Day]

Uh, Nuke, 5 bits = 2^5 shades = 32 shades. That's low precision for RGB. At least the current 256 colors map gives you 8-bits/channel.