#olympic-games

normal maps are important its just people who dont know how to use them properly and mess it up

ELB had a hard time adapting to rendering and effects on modern consoles. I remember they had a job offer for "PS3 shader developers" on their website for more than a year prior to Spyro's release.

I wouldn't be surprised if OG/X360 was mainly an exercise in creating normal maps, as that's basically the only change to the game.

I still have to check, would be funny if they used high res 2048x2048 normal maps on top of low res 64x64 diffuse maps xD

I think the problem that impacted ELB a lot is their reliance on Renderware, which was already "dead" when the Xbox360, PS3 and even the Wii just came up

When these platforms were released, Renderware was no longer sold anymore

Renderware was eventually probably ported to these platforms (only for existing customers, EA who bought the company still had contracts to give support to Renderware I guess), but probably only the minimum was done so they work on them, with no additional features

So if ELB wanted to take advantage of the Xbox/PS3 new GPU capabilities, they probably had to do that themselves, by modifying the Renderware source code themselves (which means that would need knowledge about how Renderware internally works), or by writing their own renderer...

Funnily when extracting the game files I managed to find source code for the shaders, and seeing some French comments in it does imply that ELB had to do them themselves

``` /* declaration des constantes booléennes */ /**********************************************************************************************************/ /* EnumName, type, shader prefixe, nom, numero de registre, nombre de registre occupé */ /**********************************************************************************************************/ // // les constantes de pixel ne sont supporter qu'a partir des versions ps_2_a des shader // pour ne pas se limiter a cette valeur on n'utilisera pas les booleens sur pc (_WINDOWS) // mais seulement sur 360. Ce qui est le cas du calcul du fog au pixel qui n'est calculer que sur 360. // DeclareUniform(PSCB_VERT_FIRST, bool, u_bVertexColorFirst, 0, 1) /**********************************************************************************************************/ /* EnumName, type, shader prefixe, nom, N° registre, nb registre occupé */ /**********************************************************************************************************/ ```

Adrien the mythbuster

Comment also implies that shaders would work on PC too

Crazy

Slowly but surely the history of ELB is unearthed.

We can make a documentary in a few years

By 2011 a lot of ELB employees were complaining about the company's unwillingness to switch to a new engine. There was a French "rate your employer" forum where they were openly raging against Jean-Marie Nazaret. A few months later, in 2012, he closed the company. Apparently, during those final months a few employees at ELB were working on a sidescroller jump n run with an orange dragonfly as the main character. There was an article that had these developers asking for funding to build a new studio and finish that game, but that was the last thing I ever heard from ELB. Until OSome came along. It's so weird that none of this stuff can be found anymore.

So I managed to have X360 textures in the editor

Some textures, like this golden helmet, are upscaled (2x)