I think a very important feature is multi-passing. But what if your scene requires more than 2 passes? There should be a way to do 3 passes of your geometry as easily as doing 2. I think nVidia may have implemented something like this (nvCombineregs), but am unsure.
Anyways I think this should be standardized.
-Nathan d’Obrenan
opengl is yet ready to support more than 2 passes: the hw vendors instead not.
the specs (and the header files, too) states that multitexturing allows at most 32 passes.
the combine extension is a generalization of environment modes, plus some other things.
Doo//\ightY
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Well, nVidia is coming very close to achieving this effect, with all their register combiner extensions available on the geForce Cards (Its how they achieve bumpmapping, specular/diffuse lighting etc.).
Basically the ARB should really start standardizing some way to do perpixel lighting, because all the games coming out in the next year to two will have it as a basic feature. Game Developers can’t be writing completely seperate code for different video cards.
<quote>An effective and universal texture layer combination api is required … </quote>
I agree, its an effective way for graphics to becoming closer to realisim.