Hailstone has added some experimental shader code to GAE, and made normal maps for the castle, defence tower and mage tower. I wasn't expecting to see a massive difference, but I think the castle definitely looks better, and this might be worthwhile for buildings (I certainly wouldn't bother for the smaller mobile units though).
No word yet on how he made the normal maps... Presumably he found some cool tool to do it from the diffuse texture ? ?
If making the normal maps isn't too difficult, I think this would definately be worthwhile (for big buildings).
Part of it looking better is because of the per pixel lighting instead of the per vertex lighting that the fixed function pipeline uses. It's also good for units but they only seem to appear when they animate; try killing the initiate and see how it looks lying on the ground. I haven't used tangent space lighting which might make it look better. I've tried generating them on the fly but it would be better to have them in the model format so they can match a high polygon model and it would speed up load times since they aren't being generated on load.
I used the GIMP plugin. It's the same as the Nvidia plugin for photoshop if I remember correctly. There's also a command line ATI tool if someone wanted to do a batch job.
I'll add other features later. Right now the shader only works for units with team colour and normal maps. To add a normal map add _normal to the end of the colour texture name (eg texture_castle_normal.tga) and in the same location as the colour texture.
