Hello guys! (It's my first post here yay)

So I'm working on a game recreation. Essentially I am porting over original environments/levels from an older game (TrackMania United Forever - 2008) to the latest game (ManiaPlanet). Both games are using the same engine, called GameBox. The newer game obviously has a more up-to-date version of the engine and thus more possibilities graphically.

Anyway, I'm here with a kinda technical question. The rallye environment of the old game has a special technique to simulate grass. You can't find particles or generated grass meshes (only a few almost invisible layers of fake grass textures to make it look good from the bottom, but it doesn't matter). The green base texture still gives a similar effect. Once you zoom in, you notice that the texture has a really weird effect. To not write too much, here's a video demonstrating what I mean:

https://streamable.com/u48mj

So I want to reproduce exactly this (or a similar) effect in the new game. As I said, the engine is the same.

• Texturing in the new game works like this: _D.dds (DXT1) - Diffuse; _N.dds (DC3) - Normalmap; _S.dds - Specular (DXT5) texture with grayscales.
• I am only given the diffuse green texture (DXT1), called "GrassHH1Diff" and a 2nd texture called "GrassH01Height", which looks like a normal map using deep blue.

I tried using these two textures in the new game together but obviously the effect does not exist there.

Now I'm trying to achieve a similar "plastic" effect using the 3 possible textures (D, N, S), but I have no idea where to start from. Can I even reproduce it or is it more like a game based shader? No idea. Maybe you can help me.

All I know is that a normalmap can have a lot of different effects if you experiment with the color channels. Maybe this is where I could start from.

Thanks for your time! I'm looking forward to hearing from you.

Flo

18 minutes ago, JoeJ said:

Played this game over many years and still do with wife in splitscreen. Unfortunately the new version is so cluttered in its menues, it's no longer managable for me to start splitscreen with custom selection of maps. So i still play United. Maybe you can do something here as well...

I was always fascinated by the grass shader, and i guess it's a fake displacement using very few or just one sample (similar to POM). Likely the swirls serve as a random feed on where to sample from. It certainly requires a custom shader, and i assume the swirls are generated here procedurally with some simple noise function.

Good luck, and when you're done and remember, maybe drop a a PM...

It's always nice to meet other players. What a coincidence. ^^

If you want to run a splitscreen mode in the new TrackMania games nonetheless, drop a DM and I'll guide you through that. There's a few players who scripted their own mods to make gamemodes like SplitScreen and more work again after the ManiaPlanet 4 update.

Anyway; back to topic. it does indeed have a similar effect like Parallax mapping, although it doesn't really indicate a lot of depth. It's hard to even explain this effect, but you notice another (as you said, probably procedurally) texture overlay which is moving proportionally with the cam.

I don't have a lot of hope to have a similar result as it's almost certain that this shader is not existing in the newer game as the technology evolved, but maybe there is a way to have a similar grass effect. Still, to make sure and maybe get some more technical information on how they achieved this effect, I got in contact with the creative director of Nadeo, who helped me a lot in the past. I'll be happy to share the information here.

If I figured out how to have a similar, good looking result, I'll let you know and explain my workflow.

3 hours ago, florenzius said:

Anyway, I'm here with a kinda technical question.

It's not a Game Design question. Moving to a more appropriate forum. 

So I asked the creative director of the dev studio and this is his reply. I hope it can help you guys. I'll figure out my own way.

Quote

Hello 
Indeed Iknow what you're talking about 
I hacked a displacement shader, using a very hight displacement value and noisy height/colormap.
We no longer use displacement in our shaders, so you can't recreate it in MP. You could try to replace valley's grass sprites with something more synthetic (vertical lines), that could approach a bit it. anyway, the closest look would be, seen from side (using sprites or transparents quads) : long vertical 1pixel straight lines, darker at the bottom.

Good luck