Rendering and Shaders

Converter Tool

NOTE: The Converter replaces the MAX script plugin for exporting units. The converter can accept FBX files from most 3D tools.

Valid map slots to be used are Diffuse, Specular Colour, Glossiness, and Bump (which is the normal map). The exporter should correctly handle baked materials. The maps are available in the game shaders in the following order in samplers [0-3].

Diffuse
Normal
Specular
Gloss

Tool Controls

Hold LMB - rotate camera
Hold RMB - pan camera
Mousewheel - zoom
RETURN - reset camera
L - cycle through lights
SPACE - toggle camera light
F1 - reload shaders

SHIFT+Click on texture button to clear texture from it

CONFIG File

If a CONFIG.TXT file is found in the same folder as the EXE, it can contain the following:

Texture Paths

Multiple texture paths which are searched in order for any textures

[TEXTURES]
PATH <texturePath>
PATH ...

Lights

Multiple lights can be set up, each light must be a triplet of direction, colour, and ambient

[LIGHTS]
DIRECTION <vector>
COLOUR <hex>
AMBIENT <hex>

DIRECTION ...

An example CONFIG file is

[TEXTURES]
PATH C:\DATA\BATTLE\UNITTEXTURES
PATH C:\DATA\TEXTURES

[LIGHTS]
DIRECTION 0 -1 0
COLOUR FFFF0000
AMBIENT FF003300

DIRECTION 1 0 0
COLOUR FFFFFF00
AMBIENT 0

Default Shaders

The system loads and uses some specific default shaders for specific types of rendering from CORE/SHADERS. These are:

screenrgba.txt
font.txt
grey.txt
screenrgba_solid.txt

The above shaders are used for standard UI object rendering and font drawing, and will generally not be changed by the user.

lit.txt - draw standard lit objects (lit via normals)
prelit.txt - draw prelit objects (vertex colour stored in vertex data)
normal.txt - draw objects with normal mapping (vertex data includes tangent space info)
lit_skin.txt - draw as per lit.txt but with hardware skinning
normal_skin.txt - draw as per normal.txt but with hardware skinning

These shaders are generally the ones that you will customise to your specific workflow and texture setups.

Shader input data

When writing shaders, the following registers can be assumed to be filled

• world matrix c0
• view matrix c4
• projection matrix c8
• WVP combo c12
• light data (dir, colour, ambient) c16
• world Normal matrix c20
• shadowmap lighting trx combo c24
• camera position vector c28
• camera look vector c29
• C30 is sometimes used to store 4 pseudo random numbers constant for a given instance of a mesh (e.g. per unit, per object)
• c31 not used yet

• c32 assume all past here are bones