...producing, or supporting reflection maps?

I was curious, only because I was looking for something totally unrelated, and came across this tutorial. http://www.simmerspaintshop.com/forums/f41-targetware-tutorials/reflection-maps-480/

I thought I had seen reference in the past to .tga files, but was unsure if this was on the EAW forum or not. Just wondered twas all. If this question exposes my complete and total lack of EAW knowledge it would not be the first time, and I apologise in advance

Thanks for any replies!



Col.

Woow! Nate,

I can't imagine how much harware you'd need to creat 'reflective mapping'
Let alone have it rendered at an EAW squadron level....

Here have been attempts, in the past, to show a polished metal finish
but nothing at this level of refinememt....

IronMike would be interested in adding such a skin
to his muli-skinned sqaudrons....I'll bet

Cheers mate
David

EAW does not use Open GL and later DX commands, which Targetware takes atvantage of. So, the chances of getting this working in EAW at present, I think is a non goer. Who is not to say though, in the future it might be possible, but only after a total update of the code.

I might say, the effects shown in the video were so over cooked, as to be unrealistic for wartime ally finish.

interesting:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflection_mapping

Hi Col.J.D.Landers,

Welcome from my sunny penthouse balcony, overlooking the water at Nha Trang in Vietnam.(having a pleasant holiday and just looking in on the forum)

The effect you are interested in is all done in the video card rather than on the CPU.

The video cards had processing units that are called Pixel Shader units and Vertex shader units.
These units are simple computer cores in their own right, and run special code fragments called "Shader Code". This code works on the vertex values of the polygons and on the pixel colors of each pixel themselves.
In something like a medium powered video card like the ATI/AMD HD4850, one will find around 800 of these shader processing units inbuilt in the card.(think of it as a specialised 800 core CPU) Basically the video card has computational power inbuilt that is maybe 10 to 100 times more powerfull than probably the most powerfull commercial based CPU available today, but they can only handle limited set of instructions.
For a modern Video card, that sort of effect barely even raises its heartbeat, let alone being considered any sort of major load.

The problem is that EAW is written and compiled to run in compatibility mode of DX6, and there is no feature set in there to run shader code on the video card under DX6.

The whole 3D rendering side of the EAW code would have to be rewritten, and the chance of that happening in the near future is probably nill.

Great to see you on the forum again.

Regards Syddy

Hey guys,

John: Thanks for the technical. Much appreciated.

Syd: Appreciate your taking the effort to break it all down succintly. I understand now.

David: Hope you're well and good to hear from you!

Iron Mike: Keep up the good work, the multi-skin effort is superb!

Roy: Thanks for the wiki page.

I thought reflective mapping might be a bit more than the fine old lady could handle right now, but artwork wise, it seemed to have such yummie potential to 'bite on' that I thought there was no harm in asking.

Thanks for the feedback everyone

Col.

Likewise Nate,

Don't make your visits 'too few and far between' in the future....

Your input, on this board, is valued and appreciated by this membership.

Cheers mate
David