Reflection textures and postprocess effects

brus

Is it possible to implement in IE reflection and specular textures with vertex shaders, bloom pass and soft blur vertex shader (similar to DOF effect) ?

cmk24

Seeing as the IE uses pre-rendered 2D assets (backgrounds and sprites) I don't think it supports any types of shaders or post-processing effects. Remember, this game engine was made back in 1998, well before real-time rendering was a thing.

This beamblog post might answer some of your question better than I can: http://blog.beamdog.com/2015/02/spotlight-on-area-development.html

brus

Well, I think that any engine can be modified and upgraded.
What about pixel based shaders ? Could have been used as PP?

Faydark

Although the art is 2D, I submit an educated guess that the EE's are capable of using shaders, due to them running on such a wide variety of modern hardware. It would probably be harder for them to not use shaders than the other way around. It would not surprise me to find that the sprites are rendered as textured quads via hardware acceleration for example. On the other hand, it's also possible that they are just blitting the sprites to a back buffer texture (which would be slower, but probably still fast enough on modern hardware anyway).

Having said that, the features @brus mentioned would be exceptionally difficult to implement nicely but still "correctly" in 2D, shader use or not. =D

Durenas

They could use fullscreen shaders, to modify the visuals(like, making everything greyscale, for example), but there are very few actual 3D effects on-screen. The spell effects are the only thing I can think of offhand that is truly 3D. The water is a pre-rendered 2d effect. Think, like an animated GIF instead of a rendered model on the fly. When you say 'reflected' the question is 'reflect what?' Everything that could be reflected is a 2D sprite, which would look very odd reflected in the water.

brus

With reflection textures, I meant higher specular pass with bump maps.