[Krackers87]

we need a option to have reflective ish textures or like shine maps where the whiter they are tyhe more reflective a material becomes.

Also im not sure what to call this but theres this crhome effect that sorta shimmers and changes as you move the angle fromn which u face it. Sorta like the boss milkshape viewer model from this site:
http://www.swissquake.ch/chumbalum-soft/models/

maybe someone else can define it for me, but id REALLY like to see this in FS2.

[Bobboau]

it's called environment mapping, and I want to do this
I made an interesting experement today to try, unfortunatly it failed but this is the third time I've tried and I'm getting closer every time

actualy the only thing I wasn't able to do was stabley generate the environment map, and I was trying cubic mapping wich is the hardest thing to do, so tecnicaly I could hack in spherical mapping with a predefined texture easily

[Krackers87]

i have little idea of what most of it meant but progress = good

[Fry_Day]

I was thinking that envmapping could use the shinemap as a mask, which would be even better (As specular lighting is light that is directly reflected from the light source to the view point, and enviroment maps are generally simulating reflections, so less shiny parts are also less reflective)

[Bobboau]

agreed

[Lightspeed]

yep use the shinemap as a base image.

Also, would this improve effects like when shoot with my Subach HL7 near a capship to get a nicer reflection on the hull of it?

[Flipside]

You would see the light, but you would be unlikely to see the reflection of the shot, I would have thought that to have full ray-traced reflections such as those would take a lot of processor time? However, Environment mapping would be good, not only could it be used for the skybox, but if you then used the same Bitmap for the Cockpit environment map as you do for the Skybox, it should produce a pretty good effect

Flipside

[Lightspeed]

Originally posted by Flipside
...You would see the light, but you would be unlikely to see the reflection of the shot, ...

yes, that's what i meant. Because the old system kinda had something similar but it never really worked (sometimes things werent lit at all, or lit completely wrong). With HT&L that thing seems to have stopped working nearly completely.

[Starks]

WTF is the "Skybox"?

[Flipside]

Skybox is something Phreak is working on, it places a pof around the play area that you can put bitmaps onto for nebula, stars etc The problem at the moment is the mapping of a sphere, something Environmental mapping should be able to fix if I remember correctly

http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,18314.0.html

Flipside

[Starks]

PHREAK! Why did you take down the pics?

[Flipside]

Anyway, no more thread hijacking from me

Flipside

[Starks]

It looks like any Targa or PCX would...

[Flipside]

That's what it's supposed to look like, except it covers the entire sky, stars & all, consider it a sky-sized decoration

Flipside

[Bobboau]

now with environment mapping you would be able to see the nebulas and suns and stuff reflected on the ships, this is not ray traceing, it is environment mapping, BIG HUGE UNBELEVABLY MASSIVE diference, in fact they are not even in the slightest bit related, they are about as far apart as two thing can be while at the same time being rendering effects for use in CG.
environment mapping is a lot simpler than you probly think, you basickly render the background to a texture then use the polygon's normals to determine what part of the texture they should be showing, in this way they aproxamate the visual apearence of extreem reflectability

[phreak]

LL: swooh is being a pain again.  time to beat stealth

to linux coders: uh.. rendering to a texture will require some wgl extensions for maximum speed (i'm sure you can use CopyTexImage)

[Setekh]

Originally posted by LLivingLarge
It looks like any Targa or PCX would...

Or JPG. TGAs are slow as heck, the size increase even outweighs the CPU cycles needed for JPG decompression.

[Fineus]

What if we just used uncompressed JPEG files? The size would still be much smaller than TGA...

[Lightspeed]

the current TGAs i have work fine for me

[Taristin]

Because you have an uberPc... bugger.