[Deathstorm V2]

I saw a ship once that had unstable mapping, gave it a metallic effect (i.e. the texes shifted around as my fighter moved - looked good though)

Not quite reflections, but close.

[Nuke]

once the multitexturing is figured out, we need a shaders.tbl then when we want to use a shader effect we could point it to an entry in that table instead of pointing to a texture file. i perfer simple scripting language when it comes to shaders.

[Flipside]

The effect is called Chroming, I'm not a coder, but I believe all it does is make the material an 'environment map' instead of an object map, when the eye moves, the object map remains fixed to the polygons, in an environment map, when the model moves, the textures moves across it, as though under a projection lamp. By using curved meshes, you can get a very good metalliglass effect

As I say, I'm not a coder, but I think this wouldn't be too hard to implement?

Flipside

[Fry_Day]

Originally posted by IceFire

What about the relatively simple metal shine effect that we've seen in games like StarLancer and back as far as Privateer 2 (which used a software renderer)?  Is there a technical reason why even the old DX5 version of the FreeSpace engine couldn't do that?

Technically, they do that using sphere mapping. Sphere mapping is extremely simple to implement without the API having anything to do with it, but, you need the tranformed normals passed to the renderer for it. If I had that, I could indeed do shiny-metal and fake phong effects. Two problems limit me about that. The first is that the current way the FreeSpace 2 graphics engine is built just isn't intended for passing along normals, and the second is that I'm 10000 miles from home right now, using a laptop.

[Flipside]

LOL I suppose the second problem has to be dealt with first

As I said earlier, I'm not a coder, I've no idea what is feasible and what isn't. Still, the simple fact someone managed to get that exact effect suggests something may be possible
Can you remember what model it was that had that effect/error on?

Flipside

[Kazan]

Originally posted by Nuke
two words
pixel shaders

one word: overkill

a few more words: NEW TECHNOLOGY AS OF 2002! Not enough people with support, use older technique

[Fry_Day]

There were GeForce 3 cards available to the masses in early 2001, kazan, so "New as of 2002" is not accurate at all. Of course, though, I tend to agree with you, added with the fact that Pixel Shaders up until  PS1.4 are basically beefed up register combiners, which is nothing special at all (Though PS1.4 has nice stuff, like a dependant texture read).
I'm all in for vertex shaders, though. Unlike pixel shaders, vertex shaders always have software emulation, and both Intel and AMD have very optimized VS1.1 emulation (even though it's nothing compared to a hardware implementation - my AthlonXP 1700+ is nearly 7 times slower than my GeForce4 Ti4200), and since we aren't talking about massive poly-counts anyway (at least not right now), the vertex shader emulation shouldn't be what's bogging down frame-rates anyway

[Nuke]

any $50 video card on the shelf theese days suports pixel shaders. quake 3's shaders worrked fine on the machine i had got 3 years ago, now gpus blaze through those as if they were flat shaded.

[Kazan]

i must be thinking VS not PS... and it was 2001... blerg i shouldn't post when im not thinking straight

[Fry_Day]

Originally posted by Nuke
any $50 video card on the shelf theese days suports pixel shaders. quake 3's shaders worrked fine on the machine i had got 3 years ago, now gpus blaze through those as if they were flat shaded.

Quake 3 does not use pixel shaders. In fact, Quake 3 was released before there were cards supporting pixel shaders.
A list of consumer cards that support Pixel shaders is:
GeForce 3 (any flavor)
GeForce 4 Ti series (Not GeForce 4 MX)
GeForce FX (any)
ATI Radeon 8500+ (Pixel Shader V1.4)
ATI Radeon 9500+ (Pixel Shader V2.0)
Matrox Parhelia
SiS Xabre (Terribly slow)
SiS Xabre II

And that's about it. Quake 3 uses fixed-function multitexuring for its shaders.

[Flipside]

Yep, I had a feeling Kazaa was right

Besides, PS wouldn't really be the most efficient way of doing it, while it might be nice to see the reflection of your ship in a cockpit of a bomber or the like, I think it's a bit overkill and kind of limiting for those that don't have PS enabled cards.

<------ Has GeForce4 MX, in case you hadn't guessed

Flipside

[Carl]

for now i think a reflection map and spec highlights should be all that we really need. full on raytraced reflection would be too much for those with less than 1.5 ghz processors and geforce 3 ATIs, be considerate

[Nuke]

my laptop has pixel shader capabilities. and whatever they called that thing used in quake 3, could we use those, because they were pretty tight and fairly fast.

[Sandwich]

Originally posted by Fry_Day
...and the second is that I'm 10000 miles from home right now, using a laptop.

Erm... I'm here...