Emor, I can kinda see normalmapping in your two gifs - however, it's extremely subtle, especially in the first one. I probably wouldn't get it right in a blind test. Normalmapping works best with strong dynamic lights and weak ambient lights, which is the opposite of what Kemo uses (It's Kemo, BTW, Gira is the canyon one). You'll really see the effect better in Todelmer IMHO, since the lighting is more contrasted.
Aloys wrote:There are a few spots that use "baked" lighting to a decent effect. In the hoods, the corridors leading to the 'egg' room have lights on the wall that do something like that and it works ok.
Yes, I remember some on the walls leading to the common room as well. It's all fake but looks pretty good.
Aloys wrote:Which I found frustrating at the time because Uru was released in 2003, the year when other big games started using it to great effect.. (Half Life 2 & Doom 3 came out the following year).
I've done some research on this over the years.
From what I understand, it appears games switched from the old D3D8 fixed function pipeline to D3D9 and shader-based pipelines at that time. This in turn allowed for per-pixel lighting and proper normalmapping, among other things.
Unfortunately Cyan completely missed that turn for whatever reason (probably bad timing combined with lack of resource and programmers already being overworked). After that, they had to keep working with their outdated material and lighting models, which cannot easily be translated to shaders without lengthy rework. Plasma makes use of a few shaders (written in assembly, yuck) for wavesets and such, but nothing big.
Plasma's normalmapping is not shader-based. It appears to be mostly an exploit of the old fixed pipeline. I suspect the base texture is still shaded using vertex light, and the normalmap just adds or remove intensity from it. Not ideal...
Personally I'd recommend Age authors to ignore normalmaps altogether and focus on finding good textures and properly blend them. Plasma has some areas where it shines like stenciling, but anything more modern than that should be avoided.