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This was a weird WIP thread. Not a lot of description of what the mod is and not a lot of pictures either. 

Hi @Narve, great write-up! I’m the author of the modern driver compatibility patch @Vriff mentioned, and I dug into the engine side of what you ran into. It’s the renderer’s design, not due to an authoring or tooling issue as far as I can tell. There are two different kinds of “bump” in K1, and the .txi chooses between them: bumpyshinytexture + bumpmaptexture is environment-mapped bump. The bump map only distorts the cube map reflection; it never affects lighting. The reflection is weighted by your diffuse alpha: dark alpha shows it, white alpha hides it. That’s why you found alpha controls shine and bump together. In this mode they’re the same effect.   bumpmaptexture alone is real lit bump, but only from a dynamic light. The engine picks the single strongest light that isn’t ambient-only and has a dynamic type, and bump-lights against that. Without that kind of light nearby, you see no bump at all. The wet highlight is masked by dark alpha, and without an env map, dark alpha also reads as transparency, which is probably the issue you hit.   For the Ebon Hawk: with bumpyshinytexture in its .txi and a mostly white alpha, the bump has nothing to show through, so its content can’t matter. Without that line, a lightmapped mesh with tangent space is meant to get lit bump on top of the lightmap near a dynamic light (renderbmlmtype 0 picks a diffuse-only version, otherwise it adds a specular highlight). But that path looks unfinished in the PC release. It loads its vertex program in NVIDIA’s older format through an interface that expects the newer one, and most drivers reject that. So near a dynamic light the hull may not draw at all, and away from one it falls back to the plain lightmap. I haven’t confirmed this in game yet. One catch worth mentioning: in the unmodified game, lit bump on creatures and other non-lightmapped meshes only ever ran on NVIDIA cards. Are you on NVIDIA? If so, you’re seeing what the game was built to show. PS: I wouldn’t use it to test bump on heads quite yet. Reading the code for this, I found it skips lit bump on skinned meshes that use bumpmaptexture without bumpyshinytexture, and I’m fixing that. The lightmapped bump path needs more than shading, because the game’s own vertex program for it doesn’t load. It’s next on my list. The game has two shading backends, one for NVIDIA and one for ATI. The patch is built on the ATI one so it runs on every card, and the ATI backend never had these modes. The NVIDIA one did, so I’m porting them from it.The ATI path handled most of these rendering modes differently, and the patch was built off of them instead of replicating the NV_register_combiners implementation. If you’d like to experiment with the shading itself, every shader the patch generates can be overridden by dropping an ARB fragment program into override/shaders The lightmapped bump modes will become overridable the same way once they exist.

Not sure what the typical rules are for this, so I thought I'd give an update. I have completed and uploaded the mod for review. I hope its approved soon so you all can try it and give me any feedback you have.

Thank you! And yea it was from ChatGPT lol 😅