Normal and Specular maps for NWN EE

Sunssarathi2029

I just met a post in nwn valut forum with had a good idea about making an Normal and spelular maps for vanilla tilesets. I thing it would be great to make normal and specular maps for all vanila content in EE. It would make game look better, while it would be possible to just turn it off to get Original look.

Zwerkules

Normal and specular maps don't magically turn a bad texture into a good one.

TarotRedhand

That old post of mine was made shortly after those maps had just been introduced. If you remember I actually said you'd have to be mad to take on that amount of work. At the time I was pitching for the community to take it on if they were crazy enough to do so. Nobody was. I was not pitching for BD to do the work. As @Zwerkules says, having performed an experiment here, these maps do not perform a miraculous transformation. To which I'll add that a lot of graphical tricks have been performed in the past to give some textures a faux 3D effect. Such textures rather than being improved are in fact downgraded at best. So to make the original Bioware textures compatible with those maps may well mean having to actually replace at least some of them. This of course adds to the work. Bottom line - it may well not be a viable option for BD to do this work.

TR