I think it is good idea to make a relative complex but compatible glsl material for BGE.
I think this example is good enough: useable for good looking materials and simple. For example I use only similar materials in my game:Dead Cyborg.
Please test this material (see .blend below) on your machine and make reports in this topic:
-your operating system
-your videocard
-send screenshot and infos if you have problems with this example material!
Result: check the attached image!
So the material:
-one UV (sorry, I have problems with multiple UVs with some ATI and with some integrated videocards)
-one color map multiplied by vertex color
-one normap map with alpha channel for specular and stencil
-a fake reflection/fresnel texture (angular map) that masked by the stencil (normal map alpha)
Very-very important, the lights - you must know the lights are compiled into the shader:
-one spot with shadow and with specular
-one spot with shadow but without specular
-4 other lamps without specular
You must know: specular is slow down the glsl render and makes very complex shader, so I always use that fake reflection/fresnel texture. So we have only one specular lamp.
Ubuntu 10.10 i5 with on-processor integrated ‘HD’ graphics
Don’t work. Render black mostly.
If I turn of lights under shading in ‘Blender Game’ mode - it works and strangely it have specularity? Looks pretty good thanks to excellent textures even if it’s not what it’s supposed to be.
For me it works fine in the 3d view, but when I start the game engine, the horses turn very dark, almost black. However, if I change the blend mode of the col_01 and col_02 textures from multiply to mix, it looks correct in the game engine (although doing so causes a splotch of red color that used to appear on the bases of the horses to disappear).
The frame rate does slow down a bit when I zoom in, but I have a really old graphics card(Nvidia GeForce 6800).
The speed is OK to. In blender it reports 25fps - in game mode I have 60fps for a small render and it stays above 25fps almost up to full screen. This is with two (2!) shadow casting lamps and in blender (blenderplayer is usually a bit faster for me).
Don’t know if it’s the latest blender builds or better drivers in Ubuntu 11.04 but my graphics have improved by magnitudes.