Plan for Chris "Hobbiticus" Weiland

For the passed few weeks, I've been working on specularity in Torque on all objects. So far, terrain, .dts, and water all have bump mapping and specularity using vertex/fragment programs. I've used Cg as the api of doing all of this. I've had to first integrate the Cg api into the engine, then apply it to each type of rendered object to get something that looks quite nice. Torque can be a very dark engine most of the time, so it's nice to see some specular highlights and shininess to brighten it up a bit.

The source code for this will not be made public, but I'm thinking of releasing it at some point as a content pack for $15-20. Hey, I gotta make money some way, right? The most major change was ripping out all references to voodoo and d3d, which greatly simplified the graphics layer, cut the executable down by a couple hundred killobytes, and sped up the startup time. Other than that, it's just a matter of integrating the rendering techniques into all of the objects, which can actually be quite a challenge. Though, so far I'd like to thank Clark Fagot for writing the TS library so nicely as to allow such effects with minimal impact :)

Anyway, I bet you're hungry for some pics, so here are some examples of what's been done:

BEFORE:
Torque guy: hobbiticus.acm.jhu.edu/things/guyBefore.png
Orc: hobbiticus.acm.jhu.edu/things/orcBefore.png
Campfire circle: hobbiticus.acm.jhu.edu/things/campBefore.png

AFTER:
Torque guy: hobbiticus.acm.jhu.edu/things/guyAfter.png
Orc: hobbiticus.acm.jhu.edu/things/orcAfter.png
Campfire circle: hobbiticus.acm.jhu.edu/things/campAfter.png

Here are some links to some movies that really show off the realtime specular and water reflections:
hobbiticus.acm.jhu.edu/things/shiny.avi
hobbiticus.acm.jhu.edu/things/shinybump.avi
hobbiticus.acm.jhu.edu/things/beforeafter.avi


Also, if Mark reads this, can you help me out with this?
www.garagegames.com/mg/forums/result.thread.php?qt=13110
Thanks :)

Oh, and I know about the wierd stuff - I think those are just errors in the models, but I don't know for sure. My appologies if some of the links don't work as I have no time to test them since I'm going to be late for my physics lab...

Whoops! fixed the movie urls