EviLTaxi

mh yes, I recall having problems running Max Payne on xp aswell...what a shame. I really liked fear the first time I played it. I guess it was all the "new" slomo stuff (we already had slomo in mp years before in The Specialists ) and the shock effects. the second time it was nothing but boring. you get used to the massive special effects and know when to expect the shocking moments.

mh well including an HDR normal map for every material would be a solution but that's just too much. of course, I am focused on the graphical quality but it just doesn't pay off. this parameter being intended for the height2normal generator mainly is what I was afraid of. too bad it does not have an impact at all. the whole "lightmappedgeneric_HDR_dx9" works as I've tried it out with turning on the cubemap spec maps but bumpscale does nothing.

unfortunately, "$bumpscale" does not seem to work.

wow. one year later. well, good that you're "back on track" at all I think architecture and layout is great but it really lacks color variation I think. It all looks pretty dull because almost everything is grey. is that your intention? the bricks are all made of the same material, it's okay that they look the same all over the place. but even in places where you could have added color like the roof or the rock material, you didn't. they're all grey. to get some more color in there you could add banners and flags for example. another thing that makes the whole map look very ut-like is that it looks like a "perfectly rundown" place. and that makes this whole environment look artificial. (and I believe you want to make it look realistic) "perfectly rundown" because on the one hand there are holes in the walls and broken floors etc but right next to such areas is a totally clean floor with a trim that perfectly edges the whole platform. mh before I write anything more please tell me if I talk & talk although it all is intended to be like that

yes, that's true. my point was just that I already wrote about your thesis and that this thesis turned out to be wrong because it doesn't matter where the normal map is, they overall get weaker with HDR turned on. anyway, thank you for your help this seems to be the solution! thank you hessi. I already knew that you can set fallback shaders for materials but I didn't know that you can even set the intensitiy for the normal map when HDR is on! thanks I will try this out and post about the result

although I appreciate that you've thought of the solution that HDR "is fucking up the effectiveness of the normal map", I would also appreciate if you would read my post entirely: meanwhile, I did another test. turning off the bloom effect only (with "mat_hdr_level 0") while HDR was still on, I saw that the bloom effect itself does not alternate the normal maps in any way. they still look very weak as in the gif. of course, the bloom effect does overlay materials and if it is strong enough it even overlays materials completely but with HDR, all normal maps are getting very weak, no matter if their face is hit by direct light or not, no matter if they have a bloom effect or not. here another gif to emphasize what I mean see how the normal maps are stonger only if HDR is completely off

that's some really nice environment! you might want to use a lower lightmap scale value for the floor of that wooden building to get some more exact shodows and put the faces of the round pillars in one smoothing group. that kind of architecture in combination with the trees reminds me of these typical japanese gardens. is that what you aim for?

well, the blue channel does have a very light version of a height map. I've put some stronger heightmaps in there and as you said, contrast goes up but uglyness goes along. unfortunately, it does also not change anything about the difference between LDR & HDR. I did another full compile with LDR and HDR values using the same values and nothing as changed I've just read in the SDK Docs that HDR values should be slightly less intense than LDR values. I'll try that out aswell although I don't expect too much of it.

no, they don't.

hey that is one exceptional project! a good idea to do that there are a few spots that could probably use some more color like the ground in the lower left corner, that backyard. and the trees in the middle on the left near the houses. looking good! Your work made me curious and I searched for an old picture of my hometown but I haven't found anything on the net. maybe there are some in the town's museum

hehe yes, it really is the opposite of what you expect to get when you use HDR! I've set the HDR and LDR ambient light settings of my light_environment to the same value. I did mess around with the brightness values for HDR & LDR to see how it affects the lighting. do you by any chance refer to the brightness value instead of the ambient value? ..because it's the brightness value which is mainly responsible for the bloom effect. anyway, I think the first time I did a full compile I hadn't changed anything about the lighting ...and this problem occurred. (the values for HDR & LDR are the same by default) I might be wrong so I'll do another compile and post about the result tomorrow. thank you for your help

the normal maps are there but they aren't strong, you can hardly see them.

Hey it's been like 2 years that I've posted on mapcore but now I've got a problem I can't seem to fix. I'm working on a map for the pvkii mod. 2 weeks ago I decided to do a full compile and see what it looks like with HDR. So I did a full compile and the result was quite pleasing but I felt something was wrong, it all looked way more flat than before. when I turned off HDR to build cubemaps I noticed that my normal maps are way more intensive with HDR turned off. have a look at the gif of course I want the map to look as much a possible the same with and without HDR but Im not able to do that if the 2 versions differ so much. I first thought that maybe because the bloom effect overlays the materials the contrast of the materials is lowered thus making the normal maps less intensive but the 2 versions look so much different even in places without bloom effect (with HDR on) that it seems unlikely. Any idea how to fix this? p.s.: I have a GeForce 7900GT

congrats & good luck!

you really LIKE to torture people, don't you?