Quake3World

Geebs wrote:Nah, it's more the awful low poly models that you're tied to with the Doom3 engine. I've said it before, but outline is important in vision and no amount of normal mapping makes a low poly outline look good. In fact the more detail there is in the textures, the odder it looks

You're not tied to anything in the engine. It's the hardware that won't play nice with 20,000 triangle+ models because of all the self shadowing.

It probably would have been nicer if they worked on silhouette approximation to cast shadows at a much lower resolution, but blurred (you see this often in DX9 games, but most of the time the shadows look blocky because of their tiny resolution.)

In doom 3, there is the chance to use lower poly models as the shadow model, so that it does LOOK like it but obviously lacks a lot of details. That, IMHO, while not being 100% true, would of been a lot better. Of course geometry wouldn't have this same trick, but 4k poly models (Doom guy is 4, imps are 1.4k ) would of drawn a lot faster.

What do you mean, "the chance to"?

[flamebait]I preferred the look of the shadows in Invisible War, anyway[/flamebait]

Well, lets put it this way. The marine model contains many surfaces. Some for weapons, some for muzzle flashes. It als ocontains a surface for hit detection and physics (the more polies, the more system intensive, so obviously just do a basic outline of the mesh).

Now, one of the surfaces is the shadow mesh, which is like 4x less complex at least if memory serves. That surface would be used for shadow projection instead of the main model, lowering the amount of tris drawn on the scene.

Now its all there, surface, shader etc. id just decided not to use it, probably because it wasn't 100% true to the actual look of the model.