Interpreter Needed for Patch Notes for 74.8159
TarotRedhand
Member Posts: 1,481
OK, anyone want to explain in plain English, just what the beep the last 2 items in the features section of the patch notes actually mean please.
TR
TR
1
Comments
Then you could add an opacity map over your texture for map channel 2!
My understanding is this:
vertex colours is for shaders, means you can do snazzy stuff like model based ambient occlusion or shadowing or extreme stuff like:
https://simonschreibt.de/gat/homeworld-2-backgrounds/ - The homeworld 2 backgrounds (famous for being amazing) didn't use any texture maps at all, instead they made it all with geometry and vertex colours with a doing gradients between them.
or you can assign a different texture value depending on the vertex colour (this goes hand in hand with the next item), this is fantastic for terrain.
https://www.glitchedpolygons.com/blog/2017/8/7/3-and-4-way-blend-shaders-done
The additional texture streams (for a total of 4) mean that you can do stuff like the terrain mapping above, do dynamic damage (shader generates a mask allowing texture B to show through texture A), splatmaps, heightmaps, tint maps, super special vfx (think They Live), faked subsurface scattering, or just use multiple texture sets to paint up one mesh.
Plus probably hundreds of other things I don't have an inkling about.
haha.....maybe lightmaps too!!!!
TR
You could do a skybox with a day texture, a night texture, and two types of cloud texture then write a shader to blend between them all depending on the various time/weather variables from the engine.
You could do tint maps, (though I think they'd have to be on a per-shader (or model when per-model shaders come in) basis, so no easy tweaking them, I'd assume that if NWN2 style tint maps were introduced they'd be part of a set anyway.
you could have texture sets that're used for many models (scenery and placeables especially) with a model taking what it needs from various sets (So rather than having a single 'City Textures 01' you'd have 'Wood 01' 'Metal 01' and so on using each texture as you need).
Terrain with multiple textures...
It's guesswork though, for all know it's a precurser to wrapping normals and tints into the mesh rather than .txi or the first step on the road to everything being PBR material based (.sbsar support confirmed?)
As ever I guess everything's subject to change anyway!
edit: Oooh, good call Töml, emissive textures would be nice.
Thanks for the reply.
TR
So thanks to everyone who has tried to help.
TR
Is there anything here which would allow spell effects like stone skin to only apply to specific body parts and be slightly transparent?
The old means of specifying a custom shader through the .txi had limitations. In particular, the .txi was initially intended to be a place to store information about a specific texture, not as a repository for other information. We’ve decided to create a new file type to encapsulate a material template. Instances of this new material file type, with a suffix ".mtr", can be shared across multiple meshes, and will specify things like textures, shaders, and uniforms.
What follows in the patch notes is a sample material file that includes examples for all currently supported fields. http://blog.beamdog.com/2018/02/nwnee-8159-patch-notes-and-steam-beta.html