Dreamcast/bumpmapping

[beanboy]

Aye, cool!

[Ian Micheal]

also used on the dreamon pal menu sampler

[beanboy]

I was looking at the stages in SoulCalibur the other day. Some of those stages, definitely look a bit bump mapped. Either that, or the namco art team, did some really good detailed texture painting work, to fake the bumpy effect, on some of the stages and objects in the background.

[Anthony817]

Yeah that is one of the bump mapped games. On the ground texture you can see it. It looks so good for a launch title, though still not on par with DOA2 I still think Soul Calibur looks amazing on the system. It was one of those games that had a better than arcade version port too I believe enhancing much of the game for the DC.

[Esppiral]

I am pretty sure Soul Calibur does not use bump mapping at all.

[Anthony817]

Are you positive? Because I heard it did only on the level terrain textures. For sure not on the other textures though. Check the first stage, it should be prominent on that one.



Skip ahead to 3:22, I can't seem to get the copied link with timestamp working for some reason.

Edit: 11:57 you can REALLY see it when Inferno is being fought. You can see how it makes it seem like dynamic shadowing on terrain texture from the bump mapping or normal mapping/normals as we call it in Battlefield 2 modding.

[cloofoofoo]

Are you positive? Because I heard it did only on the level terrain textures. For sure not on the other textures though. Check the first stage, it should be prominent on that one.



Skip ahead to 3:22, I can't seem to get the copied link with timestamp working for some reason.

Edit: 11:57 you can REALLY see it when Inferno is being fought. You can see how it makes it seem like dynamic shadowing on terrain texture from the bump mapping or normal mapping/normals as we call it in Battlefield 2 modding.

Best way to check take an old version of nulldc and run soul calibur. If it has any bumpmapping on the console window it should print out an unhandled texture type error per bumpmap.

Hes most likely right though unless the only bumpmap is inferno stage floor .

Games like death crimson 2 , rayman 2 show this error. They used bump mapping. Some games actually fake bumpmap by rendering/ blend a detail texture on top to darken spots like monoco grandprix/ racing simulation/ f1 racing championship.

[Gabbyjay]

I remember Hideki Sato himself saying in an interview that the Dreamcast does not support real Bump-Mapping, but fakes it with pretty much the same effect.

Of course there may be games with real bump mapping - but the hardware having the function is a different story.

[cloofoofoo]

I remember Hideki Sato himself saying in an interview that the Dreamcast does not support real Bump-Mapping, but fakes it with pretty much the same effect.

Of course there may be games with real bump mapping - but the hardware having the function is a different story.

This was explained a while back, its proper bump mapping but its entirely different method from normal. Heres a more in depth explanation on it

Dreamcast had a normal map texture format and could do dot products with an incoming light direction to modify the shading of surfaces (you could even change the opacity if you wanted to).

The normal map vectors, however, were not stored in Cartesian coordinates but in a polar-ish form. At the time I was worried that, if we used Cartesian coordinates, the cost of renormalisation of the vectors in the texture (e.g. due to bilinear filtering) and of the per-vertex light vectors would be too high. I shouldn't have worried since 1) re-normalisation can be done with relatively little hardware and 2) when other hardware came along that did normal mapping with Cartesian vectors I don't think it did either.

[Gabbyjay]

So it just adds some calculations for the conversion... interesting.

I love how honest Hideki Sato was about the DC-hardware back then.
You don't see that too often when people promote their hardware.