NVSDK v5.21 (Download)

This is a much rarer find than you'd think! For years, a small crowd of people have been wondering where this went, and I ended up digging it up out of my archives. I can't remember where and when I found it (it was by accident), but even then, it was hard to come by.

"What's so great about it?" Well, even though most of these techniques are superseded by newer hardware, it's got loads of great gfx effects and shaders that were never really used in any games back in the 2001 era, and a few that were clearly used in Halo 1 (i.e. detailed normal mapping). It's more than just a million and one ways to normal map/bump map stuff, like procedural animations, membrane lighting (one of my favourites), bump refraction, etc. For me, learning the maths behind these effects was worth the download. If you have an NV card, the majority of the OpenGL samples will run for you, but there are a small handful that will only run properly on a GeForce 3 or 4.

If you're an original Xbox freak like myself, you'll notice that they're all original Xbox friendly, especially the OpenGL ones because they expose the NV2x hardware features much better than the Direct3D ones through the extensions. It would have been nice to see some stuff like this in the XDK...

Link: nvsdk521.exe (134.6 mb)

I would post screens, but I'm on a Macbook Pro right now, so I can't. All the samples are organized in a catalogue fashion, so you just click one, and the effect runs on a certain section of the window, while showing you the source to the vertex shaders, pixel shaders, and register combiners when applicable.

Shogun.

 

thanks for the SDK!!!