Rome: Realistic Terrain and Campaign Map 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.

And here are some terrain textures. These should be particularly effective, as they will never be seen from the sides:
desert_hills.tga (converted to jpeg for size):

And its displacement map alternative:


Also, desert_mountains.tga:

And the displacement map:


The mountains in the displacement map are somewhat inaccurate in places, but this could be fixed with tweaking, I would assume.

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?

[Duke John]

That looks like bump mapping to me. R:TW does not support that, but you can always try "baking" a bump map into the texture and it see if it looks good. Some of the original campmap textures have that already (one of the green ones I believe).

[PROMETHEUS]

That can be a very interesting field , but I am afraid there are two problems , first not all the graphic cards support the parallax mapping shaders I think , second RTW engine doesn't support them I guess.... we can hope for mtw2 engine , but I doubt it becouse altought CA publicize it as a completely new and innovative system , to me it looks just the same as rtw a bit tweaked as they did for BI ....

[Lonely Soldier]

Well, that stinks about the bump maps!

Oh well, we can still presumably make higher quality textures for the battle maps?

[Lonely Soldier]

An engine that supports normal maps, can be made to support relief maps, but I think that Rome doesn't support normal maps, and therefore not relief maps. Parallax maps may be another story of course.

[Oakwarrior]

Sorry for necromancy, but are there any mods that have successfully edited RTW's terrain to be detailed? Kinda like M2TW's