Bump mapping...on a regular DS?

[sfried]

I was lurking through some small developer blogs when I came across this post from Hugo Smits (of Goodbye Galaxy Games):

Is this the first victim of the 3DS announcement ? It could be.

I was working on some new tech to support my next game. The following screenshots are taken from a regular Nintendo DS. It shows the Galaxy 2 Engine in action. It's a true 3D engine with some nice next-gen effects such as bump mapping.

(weapon and texture images are from the internet, and only used for the prototype).

I canned this prototype because I don't think there will be a market for this kind of game, now that the 3DS is coming. However, I thought the screens looked cool and I wanted to share them!

So the gun is merely a pasted sprite, but is it even possible to have bump mapping on a DS?

 

[Lazy8s]

It's fast enough to perform the ops.

Even a game for the original N-Gage, One, managed to pull off some normal mapping.

 

[NeoTechni]

Damn, the looks pretty cool. He shouldn't can the demo, he should up port it to 3DS.

 

[Exophase]

It's fast enough to perform the ops.

Even a game for the original N-Gage, One, managed to pull off some normal mapping.

N-Gage games only use software rendering. I doubt you'll see any software rendered DS games, although I suppose anything is possible. But its CPU is even slower than N-Gage's was.

The DS pixel pipeline is very limited. This is what you get:

- Nearest neighbor single-texturing over 15bpp images or one of several paletted formats (and a compressed one that has per-block palettes and interpolation)
- Gouraud shading, ie bilinear interpolation of colors between vertex values calculated with standard OGL fixed-function like lighting model
- Some combination of the above with modulation or decal (decal being alpha blend between the two)
- "Toon" shading which basically passes the final red component through another LUT to get a color
- Per-pixel alpha test transparency
- Fixed alpha per-primitive or limited per-pixel alpha with some 8bpp paletted pixel modes
- Shadows using a 1-bit stencil-buffer (requires rendering shadow volumes first)

No normal mapping or bump mapping. I don't know how you'd do it with any of these features, MAYBE the toon shading could somehow be abused to accomplish it, but I can't think of a way how. Would think you at least need multi-texturing.

See here for more:

http://nocash.emubase.de/gbatek.htm#ds3dvideo

Without video footage you can't really tell what's going on here, but if you ask me, all technology notwithstanding these shots look pretty ugly. Especially the middle one.