[jasonwatkinspdx]

Yeah, the Doom 3 engine reflects sort of the last echo of the road Carmack hoped graphics cards would go down. But everything went down the other road.

From memory, what Carmack was advocating for in this period was like an updated version of SGIs hardware, fixed function and able to chew through a staggering number of simple triangles per second. Complex renderings would be built up by compositing lots of passes. Stencil shadows reflected that tradeoff. But shadowmaps with an increasing number of tweaks proved much more practical, and design wise no penumbra is indeed a tough one to swallow. And then GeForce came along and pretty much ended any debate on commplex shaders vs lots of simple triangles.

Using stencil shadows today, or their shader described equivalent, might be an interesting aesthetic choice for a horror game though.

[jamesfinlayson]

I think the original Half-Life used stencil shadows - I guess that was the most advanced option available in 1998? Counter-Strike on the other hand rendered a grey circle sprite under players (looked okay enough - approximated the vague shadow you get when under multiple light sources).

[poglet]

Unfortunately the game didn't end up shipping with shadows despite shadows being on the box art screenshots.

[jamesfinlayson]

I think early versions did but it was supposedly removed because shadows were cast through walls in multiplayer (which was unfair). The code is definitely still in the engine, behind a cvar which isn't exposed to players.