Although most of us have seen some screenshots of the new 3D work for Skyrim I have some questions:

1) In an environment where dynamic lighting is in effect how common is it to still use vertex shading? Is it completely obseleted or is it still complementary?

2) Aside from DDS is there any other texture file format common for normal maps in games? What might they use?

3) Gamebryo used BIPED for rigs and animations. Although we know there is a 'new' engine, is there any reason to believe animations will use something other than biped?

I'm sure they will still be supported as there will still be situations where vert colors would help accentuate the models.



A few older games use .tga .tiff .bmp and a few others but I have not run into any recent games that used anything other the .dds and off shoots of this format, I am expecting TESV to use .dds.



Most Game Dev's use either Max or Maya with MotionBuilder as their basis for Animation exports and the Biped is the default rig in all of these programs so its just easier for most Humanoid's and Humanoid Like Creatures to make use of whats available and has support for a great many animation based modifiers that can be used to alter anims on the fly without having to Hand Animate or MoCap everything -> it just save alot of time to be able to blend add gravity and layer anims with a few seconds where going the old route would take hours in the Hand Animated route or take several other people get involved in the case of MoCaped anims.

The Biped is not going away if anything its getting far more popular for the actors that can make use of it.

I dont think there would be any reason too, maybe if you need something to fade to alpha then you would use vertex shading, also if you want to change up the texture a little bit it will be used, they did it a lot in Morrowind. I dont think it would be used for shadows though since everything casts one

Cryengine still supports vertex shading. Some highly praised environments made in that engine have made use of vertex colors for occlusion, and it makes the scene look really good. I'll go with complementary.

Apart from crysis again, I don't know a game that is using something other than dds. I bet Beth changes their texture setup though. Maybe seeing a swizzled normal map or something, where it just uses 2 channels and reconstructs the blue channel in the shader. atm that is apparently the best way to compress normal maps for DX9 games.

+1 for biped as well. Now CAT is standard Max feature, it's the dog's.

Thanks for the replies.

So from what I understand vertex colors should still be supported and add a bit of depth. GPU test for colors is fairly cheap.

Most likely DDS will still be the texture file of choice unless BGS really goes out on their own.

Biped is definitely 'in' which means we need a decent rig this time around. Hopefully we'll get more lower body bones and pauldron bones.

Basically I'm just trying to predict how portable some assets I made for OB will be when we eventually get an exporter for whatever Skyrim is using.

The whole exporter thing... don't even go there. Unless tools are provided, it's not going to be pretty.

True. Here's to begging for an importer/exporter from BGS or a long wait and rename of the NIFtools team. :foodndrink: