I've made some custom tunnel segments for one of my levels that feature the standard _D, _N, and _S maps. In lit areas they look cool but in unlit areas, the normal maps are still picking up strong specular highlights despite there being no light source to cause them. Here's a picture of the effect:



This is how it looks when Sun Surface Factor set to 100 (way higher than I usually use but I did it for emphasis). If I reduce Sun Surface Factor, the effect is greatly reduced...but I also lose the effect of my normal maps on lit areas. My theory is that the shader file is relying on the GG Sun to create these highlights but ignoring all lightmapping that exists within the level. This tunnel is completely enclosed, there should be no light in there whatsoever, no highlights. What I want is a more true-to-life solution in which the normal map 'effect' is only visible under lit conditions, be they static lights within a level, or the sun if the entity is not in shadow. But in scenarios when there is no light, there should be no specular highlights.

Has anyone else encountered this and solved it? Does anyone know how I can edit a shader file to achieve this effect? Or is it hardcoded into Game Guru?

AE

I would like to know too, been waiting for a while for a fix for this

https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/217930

I don't want to hijack this thread but I have had this problem for a while

There is nothing 'out of the box' at present which can deliver the effect you want, but when I add the ability to move the 'sun position' to anywhere you want, then specular highlights, normal mapping effects, and even shadows will all respond to the new light position. In the meantime, you can, of course, create your own entity_basic.fx shader mod to strip out the sun influence and maybe move it just above the eyePos vector as though a light is hovering over the players head. If you know LUA coding, then shader scripting is not much different, just fewer commands and a slight syntax change. Definitely worth playing with shaders if custom visuals are what you want to aim for (not as scary as you might think).

Thanks for the response, Lee. Surely if an object is in shadow, it shouldn't have any normal mapping going on in those shaded areas?

I have only a rudimentary grasp of LUA scripting really, so I'm going to need some help locating the specific lines in the shader that control the sun's influence. Also, I just tried making a duplicate of entity_basic.fx and renaming it to the entity_basic_nosun.fx and the segment I assigned it to was then completely omitted from the next lightmap I did

AE

Avenging Eagle: There is a difference in the shaders if you use lightmapping or not , does it happen if you do NOT lightmap the scene ? , or could you make a screenshot without lightmapping

@ Avenging Eagle

Meantime you can simulate darkness zone via script.



3com

I've done something very similar to 3com. In my areas that have blocked off lighting that are in an outdoors map, I run a script to also darken the scene and adjust the modifiers that you would see in the TAB menu to the right.

Even games like Skyrim have this issue so they avoid having dark areas in a map that has the sun in it. They just load you into a different map for things like caves and interiors.

When you look "outside" of a cave in Skyrim you are actually just looking at an invisible door that looks like outside. That when entered loads the outdoor map with the sun in it. This can get annoying for some as it creates a situation where the player will encounter many load screens. So maybe just running a trigger zone script to darken the scene is best when you enter your tunnel.

You're right, this doesn't happen when I DON'T lightmap the scene...but the problem is I lose all my lightmapping from my static lights.

The level is entirely interior, I don't need a 'trick' to create darkness, I have simply set ambience to almost zero and punched up the Surface Level slider so I can work entirely with static lights. The actual lighting looks good, it's just this annoying normal map issue in the areas of supposedly pitch darkness. I guess maybe the solution is to not have anywhere totally dark but it's a mine for goodness sake! Gotta have a bit of darkness to help the atmosphere!

AE

Have you tried going into setting.fx and uncommenting the following line:

//#define DISABLELIGHTMAPNORMALS // PE: disable lightmap directional normalmap calculation.