Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ovao 1535 days ago
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.

1 comments

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