Violation Entertainment

In relation with the other threads about texture quality elsewhere in the forum, here's an in-game video of some new textures. It's supposed to be a shiney marble texture, but not quite achieving that just yet. Each tile is 128x128 units (housing 512x512 textures) in-game, so it's not that the texture is large and the camera is floating way above the surface, the camera in this video is roughly at the same height as normal player height, the texture is just scaled in for more detail, plus the detail map. What's important about what's going on here is that the cubemap reflection isn't fullbright. I'm not sure exactly why this is, but it's very much a good thing, this means we can seamlessly blend these textures from well lit areas into areas of total darkness without the environment map still being visible, which is a really ugly downside. Hopefully this will also be possible with weapons, that's a main reason weapons don't use environment mapping, because it doesn't work right in dark areas, so we might end up having v-weps using detail mapping and thus having "diffuse cubemaps" that are affected by light.
http://www.violationentertainment.com/t ... 060313.avi - 3Mb (XviD)

Damn, was it 2 years ago already.

Things have come a long way since then, infact the whole "dark cubemaps" issue was solved between Doom3 and Quake 4, and we still use all these techniques, but more. The project now has materials that can support multiple cubemaps, multiple detail-maps and Parallax mapping. Not to mention the GBs of new textures to make it all worth while.

Hopefully it's apparent, this video represents more of a "standard" than any neat special effects, many many surfaces will use cubemap reflections, and nearly all surfaces will use detail-mapping, and both are optional for the player.

Wow! that's fantastic! sorry I didn't look at the date you posted that lol
The visuals are pretty impressive then - great work!