Matrox G400 Bump Mapping??

[TurboCMinus]

I recently got Neverwinter Nights Gold, installed it and was trying it out. It seems that enabling bump mapping causes the people in the game to look like "metal marios", reflective and with the textures totally screwed up, an eye floating around the back of their head as they turn, no face etc. Not sure what's going on because everything seems to work fine except the bump mapping, and my G400-TV specifically touts its bump-mapping capabilities (even though it's old.) Any idea what could be happening here to screw up bump mapping? Someone suggested my G400 was "just too old" to do what the game was asking. That makes no sense since why wouldn't it just do in SW what it couldn't do in HW?

Here's my relevant specs:

Matrox Marvel G400-TV 16MB AGP (latest drivers)
Cel 1.4 GHz
DirectX 8.1
Win 98 FE

[bsdgeek]

Maybe the game is doing DOT3 or a different kind of bump mapping than the Environmentally Mapped bump mapping the G400 does? Maybe the game is trying to use pixel shaders?

I don't really know, just tossing some info out.

[TurboCMinus]

Here's a pic of the bump-mapping weirdness...

http://home.comcast.net/~willow.tree/bumpmap.jpg

I emailed Atari tech support also, maybe they'll suggest something (probably will be lazy and suggest turning off bump mapping :P

[Ribbit]

There aren't many games these days which use EMBM - they all use Dot3 or pixel shaders. Sorry, but I think you're out of luck.

Just leave the bump-mapping on and think of it as "Tim Burton's Neverwinter Nights".

[dZeus]

actually, the textures look like they're being bumpmapped. Just something wrong/missing

[TdB]

looks like environmental mapping to me, but with the base-texture as environmental maps, instead of the "shiny"-texture as environmental map.

[TurboCMinus]

Originally posted by TdB
looks like environmental mapping to me, but with the base-texture as environmental maps, instead of the "shiny"-texture as environmental map.

What's that mean precisely, base / shiny? You think there's any possible way to reconcile this? Guess I could just shut off bump mapping (or play with everything looking cracked-out) but it's depressing to think that I finally have a game that uses bump mapping, and my bump mapping card is too old to do it. :P

[Che Guevara]

As I remember correct, the metallic surfaces uses normal 'enviroment mapping' (which works fine on the parhelia, don't know anything about G400 enviroment mapping), and the water for example uses a modified enviromental mapped bumpmapping (which would normally be supported by G400). Modified because it's originally a Matrox technology but works in this game only on nVidia cards and (after some patches) on Ati cards, not on the Parhelia...


@topic: Is it possible that the G400 just does not support enviromental mapping?

[Nappe1]

umh... EMBM isn't actually Matrox technology. Matrox lisenced it from certain company that run out of luck with their own card that supported it. after that EMBM was added to DX6 as DX6 Bump Mapping.


do I really need to say who really developed EMBM? In fact it was originally just made as example about possibilities that their chip microcode programmable pixel pipeline was capable of.

[runderwo]

Let me guess, Rendition. Any sources for this information?

[TdB]

the water uses pixelshading, and since it is done in opengl, where there were no "standard" pixelshading(atleast at that time), the developers had to made a codepath for each GPU, and they didn´t bother to make one for the parhelia, which is why "shiny water" doesn´t work on parhelia cards.

the shiny water is EMBM done through a pixelshader(fragmentprogram since it is opengl and not direct3d), and not the oldfashion EMBM the g400 supports, I dont even think the g400 supports EMBM in opengl, even if it could. Matrox didn´t bother to make an EMBM-extension for opengl. so you won´t get bumbmapping in that game unless you buy ati or nvidia.

[bsdgeek]

runderwo: He's talking about Bitboys, not Rendition.

[leech]

This isn't the shiny water issue that is at hand, "Shiny Water" cannot even be enabled on the Parhelia. This is the bump mapping for the shadows and such. At least that's what I could guess from the screenshot and the original post.

Bump mapping for everything else works wonderfully on the Parhelia. I can even play the game triple-head.

One question for the original poster, what version of the game are you playing? They're now up to 1.61 last I checked (which wasn't TOO long ago...)

Leech

[TurboCMinus]

Originally posted by leech
One question for the original poster, what version of the game are you playing? They're now up to 1.61 last I checked (which wasn't TOO long ago...)

Leech

Latest version 1.61.whatever. Based on what everyone has said I've given up, looks like there's no way to do it. I'm not exactly sure what the card is TRYING to do when I enable "environmental mapping on characters" but it's obviously not a good thing.

So, whenever I finally get a new machine, what vid card do you guys recommend for nice video capture and also 3D?

[cbman]

For a decent price a Radeon 9000 AIW would probably be ok