About the normal maps

[jesusmora]

I have an idea about the normal maps. in the game, the normal maps have Red, Blue and Green for the ilumination, and the alpha for displacement, but it requires a png image of big size instead of a jpg.

I have noticed that in all the normal maps, the blue channel is always completely white.
all what is needed for the normal map calculation is a channel for horizontal light and one for vertical, and the blue is used for Z, but it can be done by code.
so what if we use the blue channel for displacement, intead of having it empty?
then, the images will be lighter.

sorry if my english is bad.

[Sandro]

Two-channel normalmap is a known techique, but it cannot be used for all UFO:AI normalmaps, since they also use alpha channel as the parallax offset. Anyway, we are working on memory use optimization, so, maybe one day we will have 2-channel normalmaps too.