[ChuckNorris89]

We're the shadows actually rendered in real time or were they prerendered and baked into the textures along with the environment lighting? Genuinely curious.

I could be wrong but, AFAIK, Doom 3 was the first game with real time shadows and dinamic lighting and every game before that employed various tricks that simulated those instead.

[ovao]

Doom 3 wasn’t necessarily the first game with fully-dynamic lighting/shadowing, but it was among the first to use what Carmack referred to as “fully-unified lighting”, in that no pre-baked lighting was used. There were some projection light hacks here and there, but generally speaking all lighting in Doom 3 was dynamic.

The original Quake used a mix of pre-baked lightmaps and dynamic lights, just like the original Thief; Quake 2 (the OpenGL renderer, anyway) added character shadows that’d react to dynamic lights, so in some cases Quake 2 actually got pretty close to the goalpost.

[rzzzt]

First in shadow volume rendering, maybe? Did anything else make use of this technique at the time?

[badsectoracula]

There were several other games that used volumetric shadows before Doom 3, AFAIK Neverwinter Nights and Morrowind are two. Even id's own Quake 3 (enabled by a console command) used it though it was a bit buggy.

[Jare]

Blade AKA Severance AKA Blade of Darkness was the first engine I ever saw doing "real" realtime lighting and shadows (they started in 1995 and by 1996 they had pretty strong level geometry dynamic shadows). The game itself came out in early 2001. There's even a re-release from late last year!

[smackeyacky]

The article doesn't make it completely clear but it infers the shadows were not dynamic because it affected the gameplay in that the player needed some certainty about where stealth was effective, and the level designs hinged on that.

Great game. Thief and Descent were pretty challenging compared to quake.

[ChuckNorris89]

>Thief and Descent were pretty challenging compared to quake.

Well, after John Romero left id software in an disgruntled way during the development of Quake, id became creatively bankrupt, and their games were just tech demos for John Carmack's latest cutting edge 3D engine, wrapped in a half-baked "whatever, this is gonna sell" storyline and gameplay.

[namdnay]

Quake actually got really hard in the last chapters. Those annoying purple blobs were murder

[gilbetron]

https://nothings.org/gamedev/thief_rendering.html#lighting

"The core technique for rendering texture mapped polygons with decent precomputed shadows is very similar (identical?) to Quake. Thief used light mapping and a surface cache to store the lit surfaces. I refer you to Mike Abrash's articles."

Mike Abrash is a cool guy, not as well known as Carmack but had as big, if not bigger, impact on the gaming world. Got to sit in a panel with him and Carmack once at GDC to talk about networking stuff (I wasn't in the actual panel, but it was a tiny room with about 20 people plus the panelist)

[kevingadd]

Thief 3's lighting and shadows were mostly dynamic, but I don't think that was true for 1 & 2. The lighting tech in Thief 3 was fairly similar to what Doom 3 did - per pixel lighting with stencil shadows, etc.