|
|
|
|
|
|
by scheeseman486
1355 days ago
|
|
|
Stencil shadows were not particularly influential, everything now is either lightmaps or RT. If anything I'd argue that The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay did what Doom 3 did technology-wise (stencil shadows, normal mapped models and environments) and used it better since the lighting tech had real impact on gameplay systems other than "you can't see". Butcher Bay even released before Doom 3 did, on console hardware no less. Having played Butcher Bay before Doom 3, the latter was an deep disappointment. Also I wouldn't put light reflection in the list of idtech 4's achievements if we're talking more than one bounce, it literally does not do that. idtech 2 did, precalculated of course. |
|
|
Yeah, I always was perplexed by that tendency in Doom3… I mean, I get that lighting calculations aren’t tracing the effects of light past the first surface it hits, but does it have to be black when there’s no lights hitting a surface? Couldn’t they have done a cheap approximation of “ambient light” based on how many lights there are nearby, and use that light level as a minimum for totally occluded surfaces?
I remember reading that the choice to use black was literally a performance optimization because the renderer got to fully skip drawing surfaces that were fully occluded and it saved some render time. Then I also read that it was a design choice to give it a more panicked environment because you couldn’t see what’s in the shadows… but it always looked clunky to me, seeing fully black areas when there’s clearly a lot of reflective scattering surfaces around.