On a whim last night I decided I wanted to add environment maps to my spaceships. This may be due to the fact I saw Ysaneya’s new model or that I can never say no to implementing some new graphical feature. What started out as being a small job turned into a mammoth exercise as I realised my entire material system was using regular (2D) textures rather than base textures which allows me to use either regular 2D textures or cube textures. After an hour of updating my entire material and rendering systems I now have full support for loading in any texture type.

I thought I’d post a few screenshots of the progress including one mistake where I was using the texture space normal rather than world normal to look up into the cube map. So far I’m happy enough with the new shader however I’m going to spend a little more time making it look a little more realistic. As Ysaneya and Damian here at work suggested, I’m going to look into using Anisotropic lighting to see if I can get it looking a little more realistic and less like plastic.

The gameplay is pretty much feature complete and I now have lots of time to polish the engine before my tech demo in April. I’m going to start testing again with some friends to tweak the gameplay itself and make sure there aren’t any perfect strategies. I’m also using Kellie’s Geforce3 to make sure the game runs on lower spec machines than my 6800GT.

The pictures below are simple per-vertex environment mapping, the broken shader and finally per-pixel environment mapping using the normal map.