Rome: Realistic Campaign and Battle Maps mod

[Lonely Soldier]

Hi everyone,

After having done a (small) amount of reading on the subject of Parallax and Relief texture mapping, I was suddenly struck by how much it could add to the overall quality of Rome's graphics.

I posted about this idea in the modding questions thread, but noone seems to know if it is possible to implement such a scheme. Therefore I have posted here to see if anyone would be interested in attempting to apply the techniques needed.

The main aim of this mod is not to retexture units, as other mods have already performed that duty admirably, but to make more realistic and attractive textures for the game's battle maps and campaign map.

On the battle map side of things, this would mean new ground and water textures for the various terrain types in the game, as well as, eventually, new trees, shrubs and possibly structures (such as bridges and ruins).

Here is an early conversion test I did with a stone wall texture using a utility I found here:

Here is the original texture, converted to a jpeg for size reasons:

And here is the displacement map:

I believe displacement mapping is another name for parallax mapping though. I still have no idea on relief mapping.

My skills in texturing are pitiful, well, to be honest, non-existant, so I will need the aid of people who know about the various formats and such. We will probably also need to code in new shader stuff, which I know nothing about either, though I have found a few websites with lines of code pertaining to parallax mapping.

This mod will be as much about research as about application, what with Rome's engine being so difficult to manipulate. It may all turn out to be impossible, but there's no harm in trying.

Any thoughts?

[Trajan]

Moved to The Mod Workshop.

[Muizer]

I believe displacement mapping is another name for parallax mapping though. I still have no idea on relief mapping.

As far as I know a displacement map is a 2D grid (x,y) in which the value (Digital Number)assigend to a grid cell represents the spatial coordinate on a 3rd spatial axis (z). In RTW the map_height files are displacement maps. I'm not sure if displacement is applied to anything other than terrain.

Muizer

[Lonely Soldier]

Yes, as far as I understand it, the engine needs to support normal maps in order to support relief or parallax maps, though I'm not certain on the requirements of the latter. Rome doesn't seem to, but maybe it just uses them very sparingly, meaning that they could be expanded on.

[Iberus_generalis]

well, the game does support Gloss mapping.... and i was able to trick TES4:Oblivion into using Gloss maps instead of Normal maps...so maybe the same(reversed) could be done in rome? im gonna try this later.... so substitute gloss maps for normal maps... trouble is that gloss maps for armors and normal maps would be rendered incompatible through this theorical method...at least in the same model...