PS2 does bump mapping

Well, thought I\'d share this interesting news with you guys, especially since bump mapping in Jak & Daxter 2 is confirmed to be false. No bump mapping.

Is it possible to do it on PS2? Will it ever? What are the costs?

Well, here\'s the deal. Some hobby programmer (vers) managed to pull it off (I suppose on his PS2 linux kit) and even has a movie to prove so. It looks very good, let me say this much.

It gets better though: the engine runs extremely fast, making it possible to do 100\'000 polygons/frame at 60fps.

And the best thing? It runs entirely on VU1 alone. That means, VU0 and CPU Core are untapped and can be used to do AI and other in-game related stuff.

Here\'s the link to the topic at Beyond3d, enjoy:

http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5065

Edit: Linked wrong topic.

[Kurt Angle]

Thats sounds very impressive, if only the commercial developers would find the time to implement it.

Ok, at the end of the thread this dude mentions SH3, Ico and such as prime examples the PS2 CAN do lighting/ shadow map
FX. Splinter Cell on PS2 is the newest proof of that. No problem.
This bumpmapping story gets a bit outragous though.
Sure, there are games out there which contain at least the illusion of a bumpmap effect on certain objects in the in-game world.
( no pun intended ; becuz a bump map is an illusion effect itself > the contour of the geometry is a dead giveaway becuz it shows the direction of the poly- normals are only affected, NOT the geometry itself ; that would be a displacement map, which is an even heavier effect btw ).
When you showed us here those Jax2 pics, I couldn\'t really see it ; the supposedly ingame use of bumpmapping.
I was kinda scratching my head ; "Or maybe the effect is very weakly done....." In anyway.... up until now devs have not seen it
feasable to work with in their games at a considerable amount.

well, as has been said, Baulders Gate most likely uses it [in certain areas]. It\'s either a question of effort or not enough importance by developers. Think about it like this:

vers programmed this demo specialising in obviously bump mapping - while you can\'t just cut and paste the code into a game, it certainly proves that it runs very well (he stated what the engine can handle). Developing a game with this functions in mind should give very nice results IMO.

Perhaps the developers just didn\'t put the effort into "finding the way" as of yet? Maybe most of them thought it wasn\'t feasable in game so they didn\'t even try?

The industry has became very competitive - money is an important issue and the larger it grows, the less time developers will have to fiddle around to find interesting things like these, especially on a system where effort is the key.

[Bobs_Hardware]

Most likely, I\'d say devs thought of the bump-mapping as an after thought to the games, and it didn\'t run well.  This has been done from the ground up with Bump-mapping in mind.

So hopefully, it could be used very successfully.

There are lotsa games out there which have texture maps which are prerendered bumpmaps, which works quite well. Though somehow alot of Xbox games\' have this tactile / tangible look to them, which the PS2 and also NGC lack. It\'s almost as if Xbox\'s default polygon shading gives it this \'volume\', maybe a realtime
down scaled type of radiosity, while mostly PS2 games offer standard gouraud on Lambert.

Bah...it\'s just one piece of demo of a piece of slab rotating by some kid with a Linux kid...what does it proves?? Nothing.

You can have a PC DX SDK running demos with high polygon counts at hundreds of frames per second as well. But real-world games is MUCH MORE COMPLICATED.

iF it can be FEASIBLY DONE WITH ACCEPTABLE PERFORMANCE HIT, i don\'t see why top developers like Naught Dog, Imsomaniac, Konami, Square, Capcom etc etc hasn\'t do it already...and after all these years??

Don\'t dream. You ain\'t gonna see bump mapping in a PS2 game unless you want it to runs like 5fps.

hmm.. intresting read but no actual data on algorightm..
all bump fx in Baldurs Gate:da were just nice brute force rendering of high-poly objects with lights. (including water)

Knotter8:
you can be sure that there is no radiosity going on with usual xbax shading model.
actualy you can be sure that noone would like to see the quality of \'almost\' realtime quality of radiosity on xbox. (the tought of 5k-50k lightsources on xbox (or any other hardware) does not present itself as a good idea.)
with geforce3/nv3a class hardware per-pixel ldr rendering of lights is the usual way with approximation of phon/blinn/anisotropic... which is quite big step beyond ps2 per-vertex lights, but too often without a good gloss map which makes em look like bad plastic.

but mostly i think that bump mapping is overrated.
bumpmaps most important use is faking high frequency geometric detail of models up close.
or compressing geometric details from high poly to low poly object. (as in doom3, farcry, ..).

in most cases it is not needed, if basic lighting model is good. which usualy means good ambient, diffuse and specular component from which specular is where bumpmap is most useful, but not as important as good gloss/specular_strenght map.
this is becouse specular highlight with or without bumpmap causes the plastic feel to objects, and glossmap is only way to get rid of it.
and one thing is that bumpmapping or per-pixel lighting is expensive. it has to be made once per-light for diffuse and specular (and if you want very good results.. ambient).
with only 4 lights it would be 8 bumpmap passes.. per lighted polygon.
but yes. it is possible heres couple of ways to do it. on ps2 or tnt class hardware.

ortogonal. (per-pixel)
http://www.opengl.org/developers/code/features/oim/Orth.html

Emboss (fake but used in some pc-games,like ground in Expendable)
http://www.cs.wpi.edu/~matt/courses/cs563/talks/bump/bumpmap.html

Bumpmapping based on Index texturing quite good and possible to do free enviroment-bumpmapping. fastest possible in actual rendering stage of ps2. (as it is rendered as normal index-texture, and calculated on processor for each fragment of index (color))
http://vcg.iei.pi.cnr.it/bumpmapping.html

Bah...it\'s just one piece of demo of a piece of slab rotating by some kid with a Linux kid...what does it proves?? Nothing.

You can have a PC DX SDK running demos with high polygon counts at hundreds of frames per second as well. But real-world games is MUCH MORE COMPLICATED.

iF it can be FEASIBLY DONE WITH ACCEPTABLE PERFORMANCE HIT, i don\'t see why top developers like Naught Dog, Imsomaniac, Konami, Square, Capcom etc etc hasn\'t do it already...and after all these years??

Don\'t dream. You ain\'t gonna see bump mapping in a PS2 game unless you want it to runs like 5fps.

What it proves? A lot actually.  It proves that it can be done. If the information vers submitted is correct, then it is mighty impressive considering that the engine only runs on VU1 (if that tells you anything) alone, not touching CPU-Core + VU0. He also states that with this setting, you could have up to 6 million pps running at the same time + using VU0 + CPU-Core to do in-game related stuff. These figures prove in itself quite nicely that someone should be able to pull it off if the effort is there and it\'s planned to make use of it from the beginning.

On another note, it was stated that Malice on PS2 should use bump mapping.

For further information, it was done using professional dev kits - although it shouldn\'t really matter to anyone on what it\'s done, as long as it\'s running on actual PS2 hardware. The thread was never hear to prove that all future games will use bump mapping, but that it\'s actually possible and feasable at the same time.

If one guy can do it, sure many others could do if they wanted to. As for reasons why we haven\'t seen it yet: it can be anything from artisitc reasoning until lack of importance or effort to pull it off. Perhaps for most devs it isn\'t feasable enough - bump mapping isn\'t everything in a game.

//
If one guy can do it, sure many others could do if they wanted to.
//

Yeah right...like nobody at Naughty Dog, Imsomania, Digital Polypony is as good as this kid.

You don\'t get the point. A demo ain\'t a game. You can get the PS2 to render a frame for FF the spirits within...in 2 hours?? Yes it can be done, but at what cost? The question is FEASIBILITY.

Yeah, this demo was pretty damn ugly. I mean i had no doubt that this could be done, but look at how gorgeous J&D2 is. How hard would it be to implement bump mapping where you can actually see it and where it makes a difference? I bet its pretty damn hard. I dont think too many developers are willing to spend the time and money to figure out how to do this properly. In the end it really isnt the most crucial thing on the planet. Ill wait for ps3 to see some killer bump-mapping

You don\'t get the point. A demo ain\'t a game. You can get the PS2 to render a frame for FF the spirits within...in 2 hours?? Yes it can be done, but at what cost? The question is FEASIBILITY.

Actually, you\'re not getting my point here (I started the thread, remember?). The point here is not to prove that all future games will have bump mapping, but that that demo proves quite nicely under which circumstances we could expect bump mapping from a game. If you had paid any attention to what I have said above, you would see that the engine is more than just capable of doing that in actual in-game scenarios. It does not however solve the question why we haven\'t seen it so far, but I suspect that it\'s either

a.) too much of a struggle for the system (instead of +15 mpps you have 3 times less)
b.) artistic reasons
c.) effort / money / time issues

You probably never programed something in your life before, but when presented with a million dollar budget, you can\'t just add bump mapping to your list. There are many other things that require much more planning, so you obviously have less time to spend on playing around. I don\'t get it how you suddenly inteperate that I said this kid is better than prof. devs - he obviously had the time to experiment around in this specific area - an area that many developers have perhaps not touched because they either knew of the drawback or because of lack of time or effort.

BTW; this is how you find new things: you make demos that give you good indication what is feasable or not. Then, if it works, you find ways to implement in-game.

all bump fx in Baldurs Gate:da were just nice brute force rendering of high-poly objects with lights.  (including water)

Actually, I could swear in few places it was not geometry but some sort of emboss BM. One room in particular - the one with that sphere that makes all those skeletons attack you - had floor with extremely tiny detail (bones and such) that behaved in a bumpmapped way when lit by the torch your character is carying. It was subtle, but I\'m pretty sure was there was there.

Bumpmapping based on Index texturing quite good and possible to do free enviroment-bumpmapping.

This is interesting. Can you elaborate a bit more how exactly is this done. Why haven\'t we seen it anywhere in a game yet, if it\'s not taxing to perform? Where exactly could it be used and how would it look like?

Actually, I could swear in few places it was not geometry but some sort of emboss BM. One room in particular - the one with that sphere that makes all those skeletons attack you - had floor with extremely tiny detail (bones and such) that behaved in a bumpmapped way when lit by the torch your character is carying. It was subtle, but I\'m pretty sure was there was there.

You mean all those bones and skulls.. if im correct it was just nicely optimized tile on floor with something like 1K-2K polygons..
There were somekind of postmortem of the game somewhere.. starting with PC then going to ps2 and some images of editor and dont remember anything about bumpmaps there..


QUOTE]This is interesting. Can you elaborate a bit more how exactly is this done. Why haven\'t we seen it anywhere in a game yet, if it\'s not taxing to perform? Where exactly could it be used and how would it look like?[/QUOTE]

The bumpmapping is done by creating Index/clut texturemap with each color being a normal-vector of the surface.
making index-normal map requires some offline rendering from original bump-map to get an optimal indexed version. (reduction of normals)
when preparing the texture/object to render you calculate the light for each normal. it is calculated fully on cpu (and in case of ps2 what ever unit u want) you can use any lighting equations. (even sperical harmonics, if you feel that it\'s fast enoug).
when color for each index (in case of 8bit index texture that would be 256 normals), has been calculated you can render it as you would a normal texture.

so in terms what effects could be done its quite flexible, for you can do what ever you want on cpu. even lightfield for each point of index.

but it has some bad-points.
Becouse of restrictions in accuracy one-8bit_map --> 256-normals it has to be carefully used.
light is per-object or per index. usualy the map is unique. it can pe repeated, but then its only feasible to do directional light.

but it should be exelent non-skinned objects like statues and all common small objects.

Hey Peltopukki, is that method you describe, the kind of thing they\'re doing in Deusx 2 and Doom III ? From what I can tell they
use a fair amount, but not staggeringly high poly count on characters, while adding detail by shaded/shadowed fake crevices/wrinkles on clothing. This indeed seems like a \'workaround\' to create the illusion of unprecedented detail.