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Whew! We're almost there (and I am getting pretty tired of writing documentation :-P). At this point you should have your two parabolic images rendered by POVray. Using our map hive example from earlier, you might have two images similar to the ones shown below. Note that the room I selected for this particular shot was nearly symmetrical, which is why the images look like they are mirrored. Depending on the location you selected, the images will probably look very different.
| 1.tga (front) | 2.tga (back) |
|---|---|
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POVray should have rendered both of these images at 1024x1024, so they are much too large to be used for environment maps in the engine on most cards (definitely not for the game release). You need to resize the textures down to 256x256 or less. Your choice of resizing algorithm in Photoshop (bicubic, bilinear, etc.) or whatever paint program you use, is entirely up to you. If you are going for a smoothed reflective look, I would recommend bilinear interpolation to a lower resolution and maybe a pass or two with a blur filter. If you want razor-sharp reflections, use bicubic and stay above 128x128. Although the final textures need not be square, both the width and the height MUST be a power of 2, since they are textures directly uploaded to the card. In addition, although environment map textures up to 1024x1024 are supported by Anachronox, such a large file size is not supported on most of the lower end cards and may cause the computer to freeze when loaded on those systems.
Let's take a look in the gamedir /anoxdata/graphics/env/.
V:\Anachronox\anoxdata\graphics\env>dir
Volume in drive V is ION_STORM
Volume Serial Number is 1234-5678
Directory of V:\Anachronox\anoxdata\graphics\env
12/04/2000 03:45p <DIR> .
12/04/2000 03:45p <DIR> ..
12/01/2000 11:52p <DIR> alphamap
12/03/2000 11:58a 5,061 blank_bk.png
12/03/2000 11:58a 5,061 blank_ft.png
12/01/2000 10:33p 75,486 blue_bk.png
12/01/2000 10:33p 73,521 blue_ft.png
12/01/2000 10:29p 22,914 envtest_bk.png
12/01/2000 10:29p 17,521 envtest_ft.png
12/04/2000 01:42p 116,395 hive1_bk.png
12/04/2000 01:43p 119,089 hive1_ft.png
12/04/2000 12:54p 65,337 joeyproc_bk.png
12/04/2000 12:54p 65,641 joeyproc_ft.png
12/03/2000 11:54a 112,693 nwhit_bk.png
12/03/2000 11:53a 99,998 nwhit_ft.png
12/01/2000 10:32p 71,370 tensil_bk.png
12/01/2000 10:32p 70,780 tensil_ft.png
14 File(s) 920,867 bytes
3 Dir(s) 999,999,999 bytes free
Notice that all the environment map textures are in pairs, that they are all in the PNG file format, and that they end in _ft or _bk. Select an unused base name for your new environment map, and save your now resized files as follows:
Of course, you should replace basename with a name of your choosing. Now we have completed all the steps necessary to prepare parabolic environment map textures for Anachronox. All that remains is for us to use them, as described in the next step.