Game:

Trespasser (1998)

Duration: 13:06

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13

The Bump Mapping in Trespasser is the very first use of true Bump Mapping in a video game. Why "true"? Because the Bump Mapping implementation in Trespasser is closer to (if not true to) how James F. Blinn had first described its implementation in computer graphics back in the late 1970s, in a paper titled Simulation of Wrinkled Surfaces, as opposed to how Montezuma's Return used Emboss Bump Mapping, which is a hack that requires no per-pixel calculations and looks decidedly more simplistic than Blinn-style heightmap Bump Mapping. To put it very simply and very briefly, Blinn proposed and demonstrated the idea of simulating bumps, wrinkles and creases on 3D surfaces using height values stored in a texture map that represents how the shading of a surface is affected on a per-pixel basis when light from a certain angle hits a curved or a smooth surface with such a texture map applied to it. Doing these kinds of calculations, however, was pretty expensive back in 1978, requiring several minutes to generate each Bump Mapped object (according to Blinn) using the calculations outlined in the paper. Fast-forward to 1998 and consumer-grade processors by this point in time had more than enough computing power to perform such per-pixel texturing calculations in real-time, even if it came at the expense of not being able to filter them and polish them up like a 3D accelerator could without incurring large speed penalties. Unfortunately, graphics cards and 3D accelerators during this time were not designed to perform per-pixel lighting calculations necessary to generate Blinn's wrinkled surfaces.

The Bump Mapping in Trespasser, because of its similarities to James F. Blinn's implementation, is able to reproduce fine details on a pixel-by-pixel basis on otherwise unspectacular flat or low-polygonal objects. Combined with the specular highlighting (a different topic) that accompanies some of the bump mapped objects and creatures (see the Brachiosaurus baby in the first level!), the game is capable of displaying surfaces that look both glossy/wet and matte/dry. This level of detail in bump-mapped texturing wouldn't be seen even in games that incorporated DOT3 Bump Mapping (otherwise known as Normal Mapping) early on during the year 2000 (Evolva and Giants: Citizen Kabuto specifically), with games designed for the Matrox G400 series graphics cards and games on the original Xbox (2001) like Halo: Combat Evolved giving specular bump-maps another chance to shine. Because of Trespasser's dependency on the processor to generate this effect, however, there are still limitations at play. Firstly, because of the lack of per-pixel rendering on video cards back then, all multi-textures (which are by nature per-pixel-based in Trespasser) could not have their pixels interpolated using texture filtering; an otherwise expensive operation when performed by the processor alone. When running Trespasser using its Direct3D HAL hardware acceleration driver, all texture maps except for the multi-textured ones will be bilinearly filtered, making it easy to identify which texture is rendered by the 3D card and processor respectively.

Here is where things get a little odd. You see, In Trespasser's video settings there exists an option with an accompanying slider called "Brightness". The way brightness usually works in video game settings, you would expect this brightness control to control the actual brightness of the whole image. It turns out, however, that "brightness" in this case ought to be called "shading contrast" instead because that is effectively what the slider controls. The "brightness" slider will by default sit somewhere closer to the middle of the slide bar, with the lowest settings (slider all the way to the left) resulting in the largest contrast; shaded surfaces are at their darkest compared to the lit surfaces, with the right-most slider setting giving the smallest contrast in shading, effectively resulting in uniform lighting across all surfaces regardless of their relation to the sunlight (the game's only source of light). As the slider moves from 0% to 100% this gradually dims the appearance of bump-maps as well. For this reason, I strongly urge anyone playing Trespasser to set the in-game "brightness" to 0% in order to experience the old-school Bump Mapping in its most noticeable and optimal form. Use the video card settings on the desktop to increase image brightness or gamma instead.

Computer hardware used for the video:
- Intel Pentium II 400Mhz processor
- Intel 440BX Slot 1 motherboard
- nVidia/Creative Labs Graphics Blaster Riva TNT (CT6710) video card
- Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live! (CT4620) PCI sound card
- 128 MB of 100Mhz (PC100) SDRAM memory

EAX 1.0 is enabled along with Trepasser’s own software HRTF.

Hardware used for recording:
- GoPro Hero 7 Black camcorder
- Sound Devices MixPre-10 II audio recorder/interface
- 3.5mm stereo male jack to stereo XLR male connectors
- Mitsubishi Diamond Plus 200 monitor

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