Messiah Bump mapping... Yes or No...?

[LAMFDTK]

If I can ever get this demo reeled in I'll see for myself.

Matrox says yes but I have seen interviews with people at Shiny that said no....What's the deal here?

[Rags]

Now, I don't know about trusting any company by the name of Shiny, do you?

Seriously, I would like to know the same.

Rags

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Which one is Floyd, and why isn't he Pink???



[This message has been edited by Rags (edited 21 November 1999).]

[BenM]

Nope, no EMBM as far as I can see (definately no options to turn it on/off in the menus). It doesn't matter, though, the game looks BEAUTIFUL and the gameplay is FANTASTIC.

It's a bit hard to get started though, and there are a shitload of annoying bugs. But hell is it fun.

Funny, I thought I would hate this game...

Although MDK would be one of my top 5 games ever.

It's definately worth the download if you have the bandwidth.

BenM

[John Rambo]

MATROX just dreaming...

[Ant]

From what I remember Shiny said several weeks back that they had decided not to implement bump mapping after all.

[Ozymandis]

No guys, they said it will be out in a patch... several weeks after the game's release.

[LAMFDTK]

Ok lets get this straight...

I thought that Shiny said "No to Bump"

If it is a patch, then lets hope its better than DK2's Because Electronic Arts could give a Damm about Bumpin' They say in their read me "If you have a card that supports bump mapping, you might want to try the command line switch -enablebumpmapping and -enablebumpluminance. This is an unsupported feature."

Gee not much of a thank you to Matrox here? After Matrox got behind the release of this patch and posted pix and got press from all the major gaming sites showing the EMBM, Bullfrog say "you might want to try this?" It is unsupported? hey Bull frog fix the "disco" water.

The confusion I have is that I thought that EMBM was an easy task for a programer. Yet either no one could care less about it (People will buy it without it) Or its too time consuming and difficult.

Well Matox still has it in their list of supported games.


Battlezone2 better work....

[Nuno]

I like the Messiah demo gameplay but I think the graphics are sub-par. 16 bit color and poor detailed blurred textures suck... as does glide and the doodoo architecture this game is obviously buit around. So I don´t care about bumpmapping, it won´t be EMBM that makes the game good-looking... Maybe even 256x256 voodoo textures would do it, the textures in the demo seem even less detailed than that...

[Maniac]

Yep, looks almost like a software renderer...

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Celeron 300A@464 2.0V, Abit BH6 G400 16meg DH@150/200, Western Digital Expert 18gig, Ricoh mp7040A, Pioneer 6X DVD slot load, Motorola Cable Modem w/DEC ethernet card, Soundblaster Live Value Ver. 2, Viewsonic GT 775

[John Rambo]

DOES SUPPORT,DOESN`T SUPPORT,DOES SUPPORT,DOESN`T SUPPORT.DOES SUPPORT,DOESN`T SUPPORT,DOES SUPPORT,DOESN`T SUPPORT,DOES SUPPORT,DOESN`T SUPPORT !!!!!!!!????????


DOH, heh, it doesn`t support EMBM, but does support G400.

[LAMFDTK]

THe shiny engine is suppose to render itself as well as you system will allow it to. The poly count is determined by how fast your CPU/Graphics are. The engine is suppose to be unlimited in the amount of polys it can produce.

heres a huge response from Shiny:

"After finishing the demo on Friday I figured I should offer some technical details of the inner workings and limitations of the demo. One of the reasons for having this test was to see how well the streaming routines worked on a wide variety of machines. When doors are opened, the ProcessRequest routines try to get the new sections ready using only a set number of milliseconds pr frame, thereby ensuring a stable framerate during load-time. When testing at the office and looking at QA trying it out the results seemed quite good. But I knew that if the machine starting swapping there was nothing I could do. Reading some of the responses it seems like different machines experience different results, so next week I'll try to explore how to better secure stable memory that is not in the swap memory. Hmmm, should be interesting.

The demo didn't include the source-maps for the characters. It only contains a precomputed maps suitable for a middle to low-end machine. The source-maps allow the about 7 times higher resolution. Each source-map for a body part is about 256*256 and there is normally 7 body parts in a model, so in the retail version you can increase the character resolution to really stress the AGP bus. The number of faces tessellate quite conservatively also. The target framerate is set to 30-40 and tries to keep it stable around there. Due to some excessive oscillation in the model resolutions I put in some dampers a couple of days before releasing the demo. I expect to somewhat loosen up the restrictions as I try experimenting a bit more.

Why some of you have to recompile scripts the first time you run it is a mystery to all of us. On all the machines we have tested on (20-30) we have never seen that. It will be fixed in the first revision of the demo, so instead of a dialog box it will just show the message on the main screen so at least you can see what is going on. What is happening is that the TDS (time date stamp) file shows that files have been changed since last compilation. Maybe after installing some of the files change their time and date. Why it doesn't happen on all machines is still mystery.

Last minute we decided to disable the dynamically subdivided shadowmaps. Due to some strangeness in the reallocation routines we decided to leave them out for now. They too should make it into a later version of the demo or at least into the final version of Messiah."


I gues that explains a few things....
I got one for you, in the first level go up the stairs and start beating the guy thats welding. The sounds this guy makes are some of the funniest I have ever heard in a game!
For all of you that have no prior exp. with Shiny, these guys are demented and follow the MAD magazine school of thought.

[This message has been posted with Love by LAMFDTK (edited 22 November 1999).]

[This message has been edited by LAMFDTK (edited 22 November 1999).]