GoldenEye 007 Nintendo 64 Community, GoldenEye X, Nintendo 64 Games Discussion

[oldyz]

olllo here:

We had troubles duplicating the effect of the obelisk enviromental effect
version 2.4.36 of the editor messes up the colors of the triangles when exporting goldeneye's rooms to .obj format (i did this because i had to export 5 rooms as if they where one)

In 2.4.36 doing this process messed up all the triangle coloring -
and using the 5 GE rooms was not an option because rescaling and repositioning the rooms always created seams
(by the way , when saving the rooms move a little creating more chaos)

So the solution ended up being - do the export using 2.4.33 import it - save project -
Opened the project in 2.4.36 and re-colored the triangles of the obelisk using the GE format obelisk room's triangles info as reference -

While doing this i realized that the info in the triangle coloring affected the way the textures behave when environmental mapping is on:
So using the color information of the obelisk i made this:


Ignore the texture - pay attention to the colors
the reds control the horizontal
the "flow" of the texture is from blues to green:
USE FIREFOX TO SEE ANIMATION


The animation uses the unscaled 1.0 scale shadow texture via texture pack replacement
in the animation the textures are not scaled to the factor of .006etc
like in the obelisk -

BUt this does make me wonder , what if we could replace the colors of the triangles to a more defined shape?

use a "shadow texture" (white to black gradient)

The animation uses the unscaled 1.0 scale shadow texture via texture pack replacement



overlay the 4 triangles like these lights are:


and even further modify the green & blue hues to darker & lighter tones:


Yes the darker you make the green tone the texture warps -
the lighter the tone the textures seem to come forward:

so in the example the result should be the illusion that there is a sphere popping out of the wall - with shadow in the bottom left & light in the top right - this shadow is would not be stable tho and sort of move around-
but for smaller things say a flat wall what would this do?

IF we where able to replace the simplistic gradients of the triangle coloring, of course -
to do this some sort of dump would have to be made - re-tile and place the info for the triangles that go in front of wall "X'
- this can be tried using a bunch of triangles in a flat surface -
all of them making up a sphere or the "x"
and using the triangle coloring tool with the tones used by the obelisk (in goldeneye)

in the meantime - i'll share the patch for anyone who whishes to experiment with the tricolors - USE editor 2.4.36 -
inside the folder will be the project files so you can play around with the shadows & stuff -
FILES- : http://www.mediafire.com/?zcrudx08p3e49nn


Oldyz is sitting this one out

PS , i'm aware that making a triangle poly mesh to simulate a circle or the x is stupid-ish - but for the sake of testing how it would behave its worth the try -

take note that some shadowing in Goldeneye make use of triangles to just make shadows in the obelisk room, resulting in more polys
IF we could DUMP the tri-color data and modify it would accomplish with 2 triangles the job of 10 20 or more - shadows & "enviroshadows"
but who knows if it is even possible

Last edited by oldyz on Tue Feb 28, 2012 8:48 am; edited 1 time in total

[zoinkity]

One microcode command that's supported but as far as I know isn't used in most N64 games is FE: rdp_setdepthimage. It's similiar to FD: rdp_settextureimage in format but in the few cases I've seen it usually only uses 1-bit alpha. However, depending on the depth comparison mode it can be used for a primitive bump-mapped effect.
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[oldyz]

Ollllo here -

Updated the RAR package - in post 1


zoinkity
i think the only games that use bump mapping is the Factor 5 games -

some areas of Rogue squadron and some walls in Indiana jones & the infernal machine seem to be bump mapped -

also the "naboo" game might have some too -

blast corps & donkey kong 64 use some weird form of bump mapping that is "fake"

[radorn]

oldyz/ollllo:

yes, when environment mapping is enabled for a part of the geometry in the displaylists, the data that normally is used for vertice color is used as normals for dynamic texture wrapping.
I discovered this when playing arround with raw vertice files.
In GE format, each vertice is specified as 16byte blocks in a file that contains all of them. the included info is XYZ coordinates, UV coordinates and finally RGB shading. When environment mapping is enabled, RGB values are used as coordinates for specifying a normal's vector. Somehow this static data is used in combination with the viewing vector at render time (rotation only) to produce NEW UV COORDS at each frame.
For this reason, although apparently not required, original models that use environment mapping have zeroed static UVs, since they are going to be overwritten dynamically at render time anyway.

As for how to generate the proper effect. well, it's rather hard to, specially lacking real time rendering of the env map effect in the GEPD editor or model editor.

if you want to see some crazy env map effect's rgb, look at the eye in bunker.

[zoinkity]

I should note though that the effect is very processor-heavy, in this case the RDP doing a stackload of calculations it normally wouldn't need to. This microcode wasn't optimized for it, though later ones were.

Actually, where you may find a little help for this and probably a few decent viewers would be the various Zelda64 projects. Zelda and many of the games that followed it use enviroment mapping exclusively. It's interesting, since mircocodes that were optimized for it always preset the vectors. Prior to Zelda you tended to only see it used for cheap tricks like metallics.
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[Trevor]

Zelda Env Mapping? Really? Ill need to see if I can spot it, I cant say I have before :lol

Hmm, zeroed UV's thats a waste, why didnt they set the EnvMapping flag to 1 and then use UVs for normals (Instead of rgb), this would have meant you could shade env mapped objects (Like I initialy did for Goldfinger untill we realised it was stored as RGB)

Any way of changing this behaviour?

Trev
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[zoinkity]

Everything in Zelda is done like that. Anything using its engine is too, such as Animal Forest.

"Changing that behaviour" involves changing every display list, saved and autogenerated, in the entire game. You can have fun doing that if you like...
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