Pixel shaders are something I was exposed to while modding the Serious Sam engine recreationally, and I understand Quake or UT or some other game that's not Half-Life also uses them.
Basically, you create a special greyscale texture for your model, and then any areas that are exactly the same shade of grey get rendered with exactly the same lighting values. The practical use of this is that if you do it right, models don't show seams where two faces meet, regardless of whether or not they're welded, part of the same smoothing group, etc.
Does Blitz support this natively? I'm sure it would be possible to create a routine to do it (Blitz can do ANYTHING if you teach it to!) but it might be more trouble than it's worth.
Also, since Normal Mapping calculates such detailed per-pixel lighting anyway, would that just make the seams go away without using Pixel Shaders?
Basically, you create a special greyscale texture for your model, and then any areas that are exactly the same shade of grey get rendered with exactly the same lighting values. The practical use of this is that if you do it right, models don't show seams where two faces meet, regardless of whether or not they're welded, part of the same smoothing group, etc.
Does Blitz support this natively? I'm sure it would be possible to create a routine to do it (Blitz can do ANYTHING if you teach it to!) but it might be more trouble than it's worth.
Also, since Normal Mapping calculates such detailed per-pixel lighting anyway, would that just make the seams go away without using Pixel Shaders?