sarpedon2 wrote:
*If we were to use PM on existing textures (which are mostly blurry and stretched in most areas), I think the results would be horrendous. We would have to replace the majority of the textures in the game in with Higher-Res textures, which while would be satisfying would need a lot of manpower and time.
High resolution textures might not be as important as you think.
Doom 3 had parallax mapping added to as a user-made modification. The parallax mapping mod uses Doom 3's original textures, most of which are only 256x256 resolution.
sarpedon2 wrote:
*Parallax Mapping has not yet been implemented much (or not at all) into online games due to the vast amount of Bandwidth needed to generate the 3d graphics of the PM.
Sorry, but that's hugely inaccurate. For starters, plenty of online games use parallax mapping; everything based on either the Unreal 3 engine or the IDTech4 engine has it for sure.
There's also no extra bandwidth required to enable parallax mapping. All of the textures, bump maps, and normal maps needed to make parallax mapping work are already part of URU. All that's required to enable parallax mapping is a pixel shader that uses these resources.
There's also nothing "3D" being generated with parallax mapping, it's merely a very convincing optical illusion. The parallax mapping shader shifts the pixels of a texture based on its associated bump map, relative to the position of the camera. This creates the illusion of walking around geometry, when in fact it's just the pixels on a flat surface eclipsing one another to make it look that way. Once again, this is all handled client-side, with no extra bandwidth required.