I received a report about bump maps not working, so wanted to illustrate how subtle the current shader is with bump mapping with normal maps. Here is a sequence showing the raw normal map texture, the transformed normal, the dot3 result, the diffuse surface without any bumps and finally the same shot with bumps. As you can see, when you apply the bump effect to a diffuse texture that already has some detail, it's pretty hard to see the effect of bumps. The shader does not employ the more advanced parallax bump mapping which would bring out the detail more for the sake of performance, but you are of course welcome to clone the entity shader and make your own custom adjustments to multiply the bump effect as you see fit.

Honestly I have to agree though your pictures speak volumes. I personally go and tune each bump map for entities due to the sensitivity. I have not, however, found an acceptable way to make terrain bump maps that look even remotely decent.

Normals need light to work, thats the hole point with normals , if you look at the video i enable/disable normals , you will see that only the part of a object that has light ( not shadow side of objects ) will let you see the effect of the normals. so to get normals in your scene you need to add light, without light you get no details from the normal map.

So if you have problems with normals, try to add light to get the effect your looking for

Well the problem is with baked lights the normals are broken, period, no amount of subtle effects will change that.Adding a dynamic light on the other hand will do the trick, that said, the shader is pretty miserable and dated, The best approach is to grain merge the normals with the diffuse add the specular map with a soft light and if you have a ambient occlusion map to also add that as a soft light filter.

The end result.
Plain texture rather uninspiring, and the shader isn't good enough to deal with this.


Grain merging the normal map in gimp then colour correcting the end result give you this, Much better improvement, now you can just rely on the engine dealing with the specular map, because bump mapping is pretty useless to say the least, and the texture will look better at lower graphics settings as well.


While you could add the specular and ambient occlusion maps as well, it is really optional, as far as I am aware the shader does support ambient occlusion maps whether or not the engine makes use of it appropriately I don't know.So you could probably add the ambient occlusion map in gimp as well.




With the specular map added there is a striking visual difference from using a plain diffuse texture,Generally speaking this isn't applicable to all textures, as some artists already merge at least the normal map generated from their texture.The shader is useless, it doesn't mean your textures needs to be as well

Every map you make in gameguru is lit by a light source the sun or moon if you go into the skybox settings you will notice how you can tweak these settings, so no you don't "need" light source as every map already has one , the light source coupled with the shaders simply isn't all that great.

There is also a significant difference between baked light bump maps and dynamic light bump maps, without having to add a single light source. If you actually pay close attention to lee's post you will notice, there isn't a single light source in those images, and relies on the "sun" for illumination.

Hi WOI: yes the sun is a light source , in my example i ONLY use the sun as a light source.

Anyway i took a look at the shader and yes there is some problems with baked lightmaps and normals , they get even out. there is a fix for that, but there is some other issues in the shaders i like to address.

Lee: Is it possible to get the exact texel size , i see in your shaders that you use m_fTexelSize , but thats only a float , also i see the 1/1024 is used instead, but the real resolution of the renderimage image is needed , do you have a float2 of the image resolution available in the shaders ? , i need the resolution of x,y to make the correct PoissonSamples circle (or make a faster linear sampling if possible), or is GG using 1024x1024 ?

lee: I see the sun position is fixed at 0,-1,0 , is there a reason for this ? , when you light directly at something you will always get the same light on everything and the normalmap will really not have any details from the sun ?

Thats why we need per pixal lighting. Lets face it, the lighting in GG is sub-par. We need the ability to change bump strength in GG and better lighting all around.

Why it's old tech, you might as well use vertex lighting then, per pixel lighting isn't going to solve having to render a million dynamic or static lights, while it is commonly used with bump mapping, specular maps, ect.

While defered lighting is a modification of per pixel lighting, you can use it with DX9 and still have the bonus of using screen space directional occlusion and have and render lots of light sources inexpensively, the ideal approach would be using some like defered shading which requires DX10.1.

However, the problem isn't exclusively an issue of the lighting system, the shader it self isn't that great and it focuses more on performance then visuals, not that the engine is capable of rendering any thing spectacularly great, with the one track mind of performance at the expense of every thing with else, and then the engine even with the performance corner cutting, still runs terribly.

So you can throw as much per pixel lighting or any lighting method as you want, it still not going to fix the poor visuals and shaders, you need both the lighting method and shaders to work in conjunction.No tgc product related to gameguru, X10, classic managed to do any thing visually great shader wise, 10 years later we are still using a bloom shader and 10 year old full screen shaders, without any sort of AA, FAA, MSAA. SSAO, is a fail at this point, as you should really be using it with some filtering and a shadow blur.

To make matters worse gameguru still only relies on directional light mapping, additions of point and spot lighting would already greatly improve visuals, I am pretty sure the current shader needs to be modified to accommodate additional light sourced, hell even the addition of volumetric lights to would a huge improvement, while expensive it does get used to really set the mood in a corridor. Then of course the particle system, rather what particle system.

The problem isn't the lighting, the problem is gameguru in it's entirety, concerning visuals.

JackalHead: GG already use per pixel light, the normal thing here is just a bug.
wizard of id: we already have SSAO , if i get permission from lee to publish a shader pack i will see if i can get some FXAA into the standart shaders, but i think somebody already made some FXAA for GameGuru ( or do i remember wrong ).

Lee no info needed i figured it out.

Normal and dynamic shadow fix on light mapped objects:

Wow, what did you do to achieve the detail in the after image?

Emrys: Nothing just fixed the shader bugs , this is how it would normally look in GG

Well it looks great

Any chance of getting hold of the fixed shader?

Its part of a complete shader pack for GameGuru , i was just about to make a post about it , so yes if i get permission from Lee ( as its based on the original shaders ) it will be available

That's great, fantastic work

If you read the post correctly you will notice I said we have SSAO, however I added all by it self is pretty much fail, i said specifically lack of shadow blurring, and now that I think about it there isn't any noticeable shadow falloff. You really can't have SSAO and at least one full screen filter......it's pointless.

If the SSAO actually took into account flat surfaces and be able to read data from _O maps, then perhaps we can have slightly better graphics. As it is the entity shader is useless and only take into account performance not looks.