Now that we have DX9 on our hands

[Machine]

Normal mapped high resolution terrain textures for BZ2 ! http://www.crazybump.com/

[TheJamsh]

That program looks bloody amazing. going to DL it now and see how good it really is

EDIT:

That crazy bump program is IMPRESSIVE to say the least. You can edit Normals, Specularity, Occlusion, Diffuse, Displacement all individually and restoring detail looks like a piece of cake.

Only problem is, its a 30-day trial (but all features seem to be there), and it saves each of the above from a texture to 5 different files. If someone can work out how to combine them to get what you made in crazy bump back, itd be perfect for the job. only minor touch ups needed afterwards i think.

Thats the first piece of this kind of software ive REALLY been that impressed by. Besides blender

[GSH]

Normal maps are nice, but require shaders. Although I'd love to give Intel integrated video chipsets the shaft, I think there's still too many BZ2'ers using them.

(Heck, because I don't have any Intel integrated video on my laptop, that makes it harder to test things.)

-- GSH

[TheJamsh]

Shaders seem to do an awful lot, yet i am still unsure of what they are and what they do...

[bigbadbogie]

Normal maps are nice, but require shaders. Although I'd love to give Intel integrated video chipsets the shaft, I think there's still too many BZ2'ers using them.

(Heck, because I don't have any Intel integrated video on my laptop, that makes it harder to test things.)

-- GSH

Please shaft them!

[Steeveeo]

I still don't get why a Shader Toggle wouldn't work. Then again, I never really did get a reply to that idea back on the TA5 thread...

If someone with an Intel chipset decides to try to turn it on, it would say "I'm sorry, but it appears that your hardware does not support this feature," and then ignores the setting and keeps it off.

[TheJamsh]

Well i doubt its an easy thing to program in. In my view id rather get current bugs out of the way before applying new things. One step at a time and all that.

[Nielk1]

S, its not like a shared is a toggleable thing. It is either FFP or Shaders, and to program in a redundant FFP system as the background for the Shader system, well... Lets just say GSH has a life.

[Commando]

It may be best to give Intel Integrated Graphics cards the shaft considering the amount of issues they seem to have with bz2.  That and feedback is rarely received regarding issues with Intel cards from our testers.  Video cards are relatively inexpensive, as long as someone with that card is using a desktop.  If said gamer plays on a laptop, he/she would be out of luck.

[AHadley]

Man, is this bad news for me

[General BlackDragon]

perhaps a render cfg switch to detect if it uses intel or not, and if it does, it simply turns off the feature?

[Steeveeo]

perhaps a render cfg switch to detect if it uses intel or not, and if it does, it simply turns off the feature?

*points to 2 previous posts stating the exact same thing*

http://www.bzuniverse.com/forum/index.php/topic,9307.msg142763.html#msg142763
http://www.bzuniverse.com/forum/index.php/topic,9223.msg140960.html#msg140960

[GSH]

If it was trivial, there's a good chance it would have been done already.

But, with GeForce 2MX cards out there, etc, I'm not quite yet willing to shaft them, too.

-- GSH

[bigbadbogie]

Oh c'mon... Please.... 

[GSH]

Filesize got huge, ground textures stopped tiling correctly, and DXT textures constantly got the transparency holes, no matter how grey my "black" was...

Convert to dxt3 format, not dxt1, and there shouldn't be any transparency holes. Or, wait for the next dxtgen release. Magic option to 'do the right thing' was defaulting to false.

-- GSH