[hobnob1978]

Can someone either link me to or explain to me what the experimental

Environment mapping

is?

Does it work well? What exactly DOES it do?

Whenever I click the flag for it to internet link me to an explanation... it can't find the damn site

Thanks.

[Flipside]

Environment mapping is like a 'reflection' effect, it's not true reflections, but very close. If you are going to use them, they use the specular map for intensity, and can make the game look odd unless you are using the right kind of files.

I haven't downloaded the latest MediaVP, but do the latest ones come with Alpha maps for the E-Mapping?

[Nuke]

thats been around for awhile, i started using them. you can use a tga, or a dxt3 dds file. i perfer dxt3 cause of the 4x compression advantage. for the alpha chanel brighter = more reflective. lightys been using them for awhile now.  the problem with the flag is that if a ship doesnt have an alpha chanel it wil apear fully reflective in game, which just looks ugly imho. so untill everything has an alpha in its spec map its not really usefull.

[Turambar]

however, thats not too far away

[Nuke]

indeed, lightys been busy

[Lightspeed]

TGA or DXT5 (not 3).

And I play with alpha_env on, without any major problems. In fact it's so close to being finished, you hardly ever see anything without an alpha env map.

The only problem is that currently env reflections are a bit messy (especially on more detailed models), and do not work as supposed to at all in a subspace environment. They still look cool enough

[Nuke]

what advantage does dxt5 have over dxt3? i cant really see any difference and the memory use is the same. i use dxt1 for all my non alpha maps for the 8x compression advantage. glow effects use tga cause i can use lower resolutins without the compression loss. if you compress a tga, does it load into vidmem compressed?

[Bobboau]

Originally posted by Nuke
the problem with the flag is that if a ship doesnt have an alpha chanel it wil apear fully reflective in game, which just looks ugly imho. so untill everything has an alpha in its spec map its not really usefull.

turn off -alpha_env then!

[Nuke]

well duh bob, im not a total idiot... in theory . was just tryin to explain it to the noob. im slowly upgrading all my shine maps to use the flag  but there ae still a few textures in the game that dont have them. im pretty sure lighty will be done before nukemod r3 comes out, so my mod will fully support the flag. my point was that its an all or nothing kinda thing.

[taylor]

Originally posted by Nuke
if you compress a tga, does it load into vidmem compressed?

Nope, it has to be uncompressed first.  DDS is the only thing that can be sent to the card while still compressed.

[Lightspeed]

Originally posted by Nuke
what advantage does dxt5 have over dxt3? i cant really see any difference and the memory use is the same.

DXT5 supports alpha transparency, and generally looks better.

[Nuke]

dxt3 supports transparancy just fine.  from what i understand is that dxt3 has normal transparency and dxt5 has intrepolated transparancy.  im not quite sure what it means by that.

[Lightspeed]

DXT 3 supports a crippled version of transparency, limited to a few different intensities (16?), whereas DXT5 allows for full 8-bit transparency.

[Nuke]

ok, thanks for the info.