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Rocks, rocks everywhere, not a parallax map to.. drink? Posted 12/29/2005 1:54:50 AM I could be doing this elsewhere, but I'm supposed to keep my mouth shut, but here I will not be discovered! So it turns out Mars is a really rocky place... so how might you logically have thousands of stones rendered on screen at once... hmmm. Options, options. We have just a plain old texture, nah, too bland and no depth. We have a texture with some kind of distortion map, perhaps a normal map or parallax map, or we can do it with lots of little models. Sprites could also be an option, but that option would very well look like shit. So there are the choices. For the past week I've been experimenting, discovering what works best in-engine. Valve did nice things with the stone in Lost Coast and dod_Anzio, they're purdy. But when I experimented with a normal mapped ground texture it ended up looking bland, especially with an entire level filled with the stones. Now, Source has baseline Parallax map support, but it hasn't been turned on by valve, hell, even many of their textures already have parallax maps. I've heard some guy was able to turn on the feature, but it would be nice if we had another option. I stumbled on this: http://graphics.cs.brown.edu/games/SteepParallax/compare.jpg Ooooh how I yearn for steep parallax mapping. I didn't think it was physically possible, but it made me moist. In the future, that could possibly make for sweet results with the least performance hit. In the end thought it looks like heavy LODed models will be needed, even at 10-15 tris a pop, when you get hundreds, thousands, of those little suckers on screen at once you get a huge performance hit. Oh well, nose to the grind stone. (3) Comments

I'm not dead, and other ramblings, and I'm not Scoots Posted 12/21/2005 6:04:10 PM If a thousand monkeys working on a thousand typerwriters wrote for a thousand years, would they accomplish what I did in two years? Perhaps. Perhaps. It was the dot-com bubble, Pokemon was the the sh/t and new useless technologies made the internet into a fertile ground of innovation in pornographic technology. And there was I, writing various uninteresting Nintendo 64 game reviews. Why did I review Super Mario 64 4 years after it came out? I will never know. The OneBigVillage network was on top, we had projects up the Ying Yang, Virtual Petz, Virtual Petz 2, and unreleased games, and new websites covering every subject. That was then, this is now. Over the years OBV has faded into mostly its never ending sleep, and Ripway has replaced it as Scoots' cash cow, which seems to be working out well. I now work on the Half Life 2 mod Badge of Blood, artist, mapper, texturerer extrarordinare. Will I ever update this "BLOG" as they call it? Probably not, because Blogs suck and are a waste of my valuable time. And has anyone else noticed that the "stat counter" button at the bottom looks very close to Stat cun ... I'll hold onto that one. (3) Comments

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General Comments quwnezz Posted 5/31/2008 4:04:30 AM hi...snoop Noel Posted 12/27/2006 7:17:23 PM Snoop Posted 12/3/2006 1:51:31 AM What PC? A PC released in 2005? heh. Look at Crysis :) The 360 is nice, but PCs have can have $1000 worth of dual vid cards in them. Scoots Posted 12/2/2006 3:54:56 PM Read about HL2 coming to the 360 with HDR lighting? They're saying it'll be above and beyond anything a PC can do... John Posted 12/21/2005 6:42:33 PM Snoop, very exciting to see you about! Entei Posted 12/21/2005 6:14:28 PM i miss you snoop i used to like your OBV stories... Snoop Posted 12/21/2005 5:41:03 PM Not reading blogs? haha Scoots Posted 12/1/2005 10:55:41 AM Snoop, where are ya? Scoots Posted 11/27/2005 7:07:41 PM w/b, snoop Please login to post a comment.