At the time, hardware bumpmapping was an inconsistent mess, and despite lofty promises, they didn't end up delivering what was promised. It wasn't until the "bu

At the time, hardware bumpmapping was an inconsistent mess, and despite lofty promises, they didn't end up delivering what was promised. It wasn't until the "bump map" was torn down and replaced with the "normal map" in 1999 by Kilgard that the stage was set for the future. I suspect that they stopped talking about it to distance themselves from that association. The specific hardware feature in the GameCube was also getting retooled, and the "bump texture" unit eventually turned into the much more powerful "indirect texture" unit, and that thing is a beast. It was used everywhere, as it should have been. If you've seen my video on displacement maps [0], the indirect texture unit was what powered that. Nintendo reused bumpmapping in a few places in Luigi's Mansion, but their primary trick was spherical-mapped environment mapping, which they basically mastered the art of. They also later developed a way of using the indirect texture unit to do normal mapping on the Wii, though I believe that tech was only used in a few places in Wii Sports Resort. [0] Should I feel shame for plugging this video? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rCRsOLiO7k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rCRsOLiO7k