Shaders/Displacement Mapping?

[FadeRax]

I’ve got a sorta weird technical question.

I noticed that some surfaces such as the outside wall and fireplace bricks in the House condo represent the ridges in their texture with the physical geometry of the model.

Some games such as Boneworks achieves this effect with some sort of displacement map or something on the texture, making it look 3D when it’s actually just a shader on a flat surface.

Would it be more or less resource intensive to use a shader to represent these surfaces instead of having it be the geometry of the model? And are there any plans to incorporate this into Tower?

[macdguy]

We use displacement maps occasionally, but cautiously.

Displacement maps are more expensive than regular polygons as they are calculated in real time. It is much harder and taxing to render displacement maps.