[Guide]My thoughts on faux bloom and specular.

[kiddten]

And perhaps some other things too.

NOTICE: I restate it in my postings below, but not using these effects in moderation could result in sluggish performance/crashing Halo. Remember, you can only do so much with such an old engine.

Now, the only thing I ever got around to testing and working was the faux bloom, but that was not, and most likely impossible to fully complete.
Just a hint, I'm not really giving any specifics, it's up to you, my fellow modders to find the right variables.

Faux Bloom:
I had originally got this idea from Refresh V1.5, upon seeing the flares from the engines of the pelicans. I quickly learned from looking at the lens tags that it was modified by increasing the scale, and intensity. Upon editing the lens tag for the sun, I made it almost impossible to look there. What can be expanded from there is adding modified lens tags to any light source as you desire, to create a faux light bloom. unfortunately, this can only be done with something like lights for example, not adding to to particulary bright areas of the bsp.

In conclusion:
This is a new effect for you all to try, but use it in moderation. I don't believe the engine could handle too many flares at the same time. You could perhaps even modifiy these flares even more to create some sort of Faux HDR, too.

Faux Specular:
Obviously this will never look really good, but this is what I came up with.
I was experimenting with some ripped tags, and I came along to some ripped warthog shaders. They looked shiny, and even blue and more greenish in places. As you guys may have figured out, this was done by a cubemap applied to the shader, with the cubemap being some screepcaps from the map they were ripped off. Now, you could be lazy and just leave it like that, just apply the cubemap to everything that's shiny, and call it a day. Not I, I did a bit of thinking and found a way to make it a little bit more realistic. I thought of a way to add light sources, invisible scenery lights, with a weak but long ranged light tag attached placed in particulary colourful areas. I never got around to completing this, but it still feels like it would work.

In conclusion:
You would probably want to limit your light sources, I'd say you'd want about 12-16 maximum in bloodgulch. and you would really have to tweak the light sources, they are a real bitch to get right.

Thanks to you all if you read it, I'd love to see some mods take use of this in the future.

[Smythe]

oooh...
Shiny....

[zapconquest]

the multipurpose bitmap for something also controls its shininess (purpuler = shinier)