no it has nothing to do with reflect or reflection as they are shaders attributes if that what you meant.
Enviorment Mapping is an Area Based such as a Volume Brush like in Unreal Engine or Radiant engine where you want something to calculate inside a spechific area altough you actually use it on the whole map or level , you dont want it to be calculated on places that the player cant reach , for exampl
Light.
if you light the entire map , the entire map will get real time shadows , but you dont really want it cause it cost much more GPU and CPU , Enviorment Mapping , gives you the Light Calculation that you want but only where you want , so the ordinary player sees everything light and have a nice shadow , but where he cant reach and cant see , no need for shadows maybe fake shadows but not real time shadows. thats just an example of lights.
so , my idea is to take this "Regions" or "Areas" and manipulate them in such a way so you'll get:
UV mapping for a spechifc object where you can paint on induvidual faces
now the UV mapping will be automated , and i have just the trick to do it Automated so you can understand it and paint it outside or inside the S3GE editor.
so actually im not talking only about EM , im talking about a brand new concept for gaming or even the entire Multimedia Industry.
lets do an Example of the entire idea:
you just built a terrain
you just added some objects like buildings and cars
all made inside S3GE using CSG oparations which can be found inside DarkGDK (uv calculations also can be found they are just undocumented and we can always use Directx for better and faster access)
ok , so we have a nice terrain with nice buildings built with S3GE Editor.
they all are just plain objects materail , grey or white or maybe red or blue..
with AEM
we can select an object,select AEM.
a little window or menu (Maui gizmo) will open up with the following or something like features:
1. Automate using ### Images or Textures if you like Image ids
2. Manual using the same as above where you can actually paint right on the UV map of a Selected Face or Adjusent Faces of that object.
3. Automate Normal MApping using what you have just painted or textured
4. Manual Normal same as above
5. Automate Random Mapping , which will give two identical objects which were painted using (1) to get just a bit of a random oparation so they will look diffrent.
the list of tools go on and on and on
6. Paint using RGB colors
now , there are some problems with it , the first too much UV data will cost a lot of GPU memory or Ram..
so it will all be algorithems , that you just "see" the diffrence beside have an Image to load up.
its a huge idea and huge concept, but i have already done some of it before when used WinXP and my terrains looked really awesome and i painted them for about 2 minutes , and Tech i tell you , you never saw anything that good looking in jsut 2 minutes of Pure RGB coloring.
now , since we already have the RGB coloring as region and we just manipulating them using the AEM , this means , that we actually can have an Enviorment Mapping solution against FPS drops.
so if we look from +900 Y with a 90 X angle , top view.
we can calculate where a player is standing
so if the player is on a "Green" spot and green is Grass , is player walking? if yes , playsound WalkOnGrass or just GrassShuffling
and again lets talk about the Light
if player is on "Green" then a hugh part of that area is now "Shaded" with high detail , so the player have the feeling like damn this is some nice lighting..
but wait thats not all more to come
