Texturing And Virtual Displacement (paralax)

[firoso]

I dunno if anyone has seen the virtual displacement mapping mod (paralax mod) for doom 3, this mod if properly used with custom textures could add a great amount of detail to the mod. basically it allows for artificial depth in textures that enhances the already spectaular lighting engine.

[god_is_my_goldfish]

Been discussed here

 

--> http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showtopic=2150

Edited June 26, 2005 by god_is_my_goldfish

[Domarius]

Yeah but it's too slow (both that link and the D3 mod) to be practical in an actual game. The D3 mod is just a technical demo, it takes too much processing to actually be worthwhile yet.

[obscurus]

That depends on your hardware - if you have up to date hardware - say a FX 6800 GT, a decent AMD 64, 1GB ram, it is absoluteley practical for a game - that is why a lot of the newer engines like UE3 are/will be using it. If on the other hand, your hardware (like mine) is a fair bit below bleeding edge, you might find your framerates dipping into unplayable territory. But by the time TDM is released, there will be no reason not to include some version of parallax/virtual displacemnt/relief mapping, as enough people should have updated their hardware sufficiently to make it worthwhile.

 

Unreal Technology made a good decision, IMO, to break compatability with older hardware and release a purely Direct X 9 game - by spending less time and resources on implementing backwards compatability, you get a fully optimised game that supports every trick a bleeding edge graphics card can pull, and by the time the engine will be released, those cards won't be so bleeding edge (or expensive) any more...

 

So bring on parallax mapping I say, if you do I'll upgrade my machine

[Renzatic]

Don't expect us to support it directly, at least not on the first release, but it might be worth a go...I can easily make heightmaps from the models I used for my normalmaps.