The alpha channel is usually used for transparancy effects, but the alpha value for ground textures seems to be used for some lighting calculations and not for transparancy effects. The new alternate low textures also come without an alpha channel while the standard textures come with alpha. For the default camera angle, 512x512 is good enough and you will notice no differences. The new alternate textures just offer 512x512 resolution per tile at maximum. For ultra texture resolution you need to use at least "medium" graphics setting because only those textures support resultions of 1024x1024 per tile. The new low textures with included static bumpmapping only support low, medium and high texture resolution which can be set independent of the other settings. Save and close the file and launch Starcraft.įile format differences of the texture sets To restore the old mode, set it to 0 (zero). Go to your documents folder and open the "Starcraft II" subfolder and look for the Accounts folder and then go into the subfolder (a long number) and edit "Variables.txt". To restore the old mode for "low", change the Starcraft graphic option to "low", apply the change, then close Starcraft. Now the renderer can detect if a pixel is hit by the directional light and therefore fully lit, or not, and therefore just got the so called "ambient light" value. (Objects cast shadow, shaped by their own shape.) For shadow mapping, the client renders an additional depth buffer from the view of the light source and transforms it into screen space. ![]() On this angle the directional light source hits the surface in a way which does not produce too much shiny pixels, hence the subtle effect.Īlso, "mid" uses per-pixel shading for minerals instead of just a base map, and shadow mapping is used. The reason is that the medium details setting performs dynamic bumpmapping, it actually shades every pixel in real time considering the angle of the directional light source and the normal map which stores angle information for the according base map. The bumpmapping effect seems to be much more subtle. This is how the medium detail setting looks: In reality, they should change because the angle of the directional light is the same while the virtual camera (to record this image) has been rotated. They don't change in spite of the image rotation. If you compare the images carefully, you see that the shiny and the dark areas stay where they are. This is the new "low" setting in from another angle: Let's compare the difference to real bumpmapping. (Thanks to TL-user Existor who found that these textures are provided with patch 1.5 and not created during the map loading screen.) The bumpmapping calculation was performed and the result was rendered into the resulting texture which is now used as the new base map. The new alternate texture set was created with the assumption a particular angle for the directional light. ![]() What you see however is rather static bumpmapping. The new "low" mode looks as if bumpmappig is performed: Values below 1.0 darken the pixel's brightness, values above 1.0 make the pixel brighter. The result is a value which is used to be multiplied with the color from the base map's texture. This requires and additional texture access (for the normal map) and some pixel shader calculations to perform a 'dot product' of the normal map's angles and the angle of the directional light. This allows per pixel lighting: The angles from the normal map are compared to the angle of the directional light source to create light and shade effects. The bumpmappig technique uses a so-called normal map which contains angles instead of colors. This is because the Starcraft textures are intended to be used with bumpmapping. Even though texture resolultion is set to "Ultra", the scene looks flat.
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