Considering a Doom 3/Chaos Theory game engine with old-school techniques on modern hardware.

[inlimbo]

I know whenever I come here I tend to talk about exactly this kinda subject but I'm really itching for this kinda lighting to make a resurgence, but in souped up "we've come a long way since 2004" form. We see something of it in the indie space these days. Especially the indie horror space. Signalis is one good example of low fi ambitions that take advantage of that performance overhead to do complex things with lighting that never could've been done in the era it's otherwise imitating. But I want even more ambitious projects. I want an indie, AA or AAA to go all in on this.

Some of you might be of the perspective that raytracing/path tracing is effectively the successor to this era and you'd be right on one hand. Personally, though, I feel like the demands of modern polycounts and texture resolution place hard limits on what path tracing can accomplish currently, even on current cards. so while it's great to see all the truly dark corners of path traced gi and how with the right exposure settings you can get filmic contrast between extreme brights and deep shadows that you might otherwise have had to rely on baked shadowmaps or no ambient light to achieve i still see the limitations of the approach everywhere. i'm stuck with a 2080 super and current consoles so while it's true i can't always benefit from the best path tracing options out there, there's a subtlety in the overlapping of different gradients of light and shadows in complex lighting scenes that current raytracing solutions can't really reproduce yet with tolerable framerates and that arguably those older doom 3 esque lighting engines were better equipped to handle

i know chaos theory relies on some baked GI in places for certain levels given their scope and the tech of the time. and i'm not against baked gi or semi-dynamic prebaked gi in games that otherwise incorporate complex realtime lighting. the darkness, prey (2006) and condemned make extensive use of baked lighting in certain places and they still look fantastic and wonderfully dynamic otherwise. and with modern hardware and the ability to throw far more shadowed lights into those scenes than devs could've at the time, it'd be pretty simply to mask the baked occlusion almost completely

but also doom 3 largely doesn't use any baked lighting/gi and maybe none at all. i was always under the impression it was none. and yeah you see the limitations of no GI at times in the game. given the limitations of hardware at the time and the scope of the larger areas where id couldn't throw around as many dynamic lights to cover the space you see it hurting for some GI or at least more lighting in places. but then you encounter a room that's full of dozens of dynamic lights interacting and overlapping and influencing each other and it just works. it's wonderful, the sheer number of lights making it so that the utter lack of ambient light only contributes to the scene because the darkest corners are truly dark but there's still this complex interplay of various intensities of lights and light sources so still effectively get some amount of ambient lighting and falloff just by way of artists placing real lights cleverly. and you just don't see this kind of lighting much anymore, even in modern games that use a combo of baked gi and realtime lighting. it's often just monotone shadowcasting with little varation and dynamic influencing of light sources because that's more efficient at scale and provides a convincing enough illusion at a distance or even relatively up close but just isn't particularly dynamic

i want to leverage the power of modern pcs to really go all in on old school dynamic lighting that will run efficiently on modern cards. and don't worry i'm not anti raytracing. it will eventually be this good, i just want something else in the meantime. for all the compliments i can give doom 3 and i think it holds up remarkably well to my 2025 eyes still it's clear it was hamstrung by many limitations. character texture/normal map resolution especially. and again number of lights or the ability to cast penumbra. you remove those hard limits and you could do amazing, striking things with dynamic lighting on modern hardware. and i wish someone would take up the cause. i suppose the hitman reboots do to some extent but the complexity of their crowd simulation means they can't go hard on the subtle interactions you see in a doom 3 or escape from butcher bay. and speaking of butcher bay, it was a major disappointment to me personally when machinegames moved from id tech 5 to id tech 6 and its lighting, while much of it dynamic, felt far less dynamic than either butcher bay or dark athena (which relies heavily on baked gi to support it). especially when the evil within existed and was running on modified id tech 5 and far more dynamic

so yeah, thesis summarizes as this. either using stencils (and i'm aware of the overdraw problems as models get more geometrically complex) or dynamically cast shadowmaps, whether they incorporate some baked gi or disable ambient lighting for the most part and rely entirely on dynamic lights and shadowcasting falloff influencing what will otherwise be pitch black shadows, i want to see a modern game on modern hardware go all in on old school "unified light and shadow." and none of that gray single toned one pass shadowcasting john linneman loves to complain about wrt to old open world games like the prototype series (which i still think has some interesting lighting in spite of this flaw). i'm no fan of that stuff either, generally. and sorry for the wall of text

 

[inlimbo]

and with no ambient lighting and shadows that will otherwise stay pitch black unless other light sources influence them you effectively achieve a dynamism between the darkest corners of a scene and the brightest corners. much as you achieve with actual GI/real life. yes, you miss out on bounced lighting but you can imitate it with clever lighting use. pockets of faint light hand placed to emulate bounce if you think it will add to the composition. or you can still introduce a few bounces with svogi or something and then additively build on that with hard dynamic lights. and even without svogi or hand placed fill lights you can still take advantage of the stark contrast between hard black shadows and bright lights like a good noir cinematographer would. and decades of film is shot in this kind of contrast. so with modern hardware and dozens of dynamically shadowcasting lights at your disposal, you can create a completely dynamic lighting scheme that looks as good as some of the best high contrast photography or the best highly controlled soundstage lighting setups in film. obviously you can also do this with path tracing but you're limited in the number of lights you can use thanks to performance

there's even a great example of a game taking avantage of hundreds of hand placed deferred lights to imitate dynamic GI in the indie space from like ten years ago. it was made with UDK of all things. i own it but can't recall the name so watch this space and i'll return with it when i look through my steam games

 

[inlimbo]

i feel like in many ways this era was never allowed to fully mature to a point where its hard edges could be sanded down. as consoles kept a baseline and shifting standards demanded character models of better and better quality these more dynamic solutions just weren't performant enough to meet that demand on that hardware. so we eventually see a game like splinter cell blacklist, which is an attracted game and which does make use of some nice dynamic lighting in places, largely rely on a heavily baked solution to meet its scale and 3d model quality demands

edit: eh, but then dead space 1 and 2 stand in stark opposition to this point. and the remake of 1 would be a modern example of what i'm describing in the OP. and i will i know the original games rely on extensive baked GI in places they're otherwise so dynamic, and throwing around so many complex lighting interactions on top of that baked GI. they do things that splinter cell blacklist just doesn't do but that chaos theory did

 

[homerdog]

I know whenever I come here, I tend to talk about exactly this kind of subject, but I'm really itching for this kind of lighting to make a resurgence—only in a souped-up, "we've come a long way since 2004" form. We see some of it in the indie space these days, especially in the indie horror space. Signalis is one good example of low-fi ambitions that take advantage of modern performance overhead to do complex things with lighting that never could have been done in the era it's otherwise imitating. But I want even more ambitious projects. I want an indie, AA, or AAA studio to go all in on this.

Some of you might be of the perspective that ray tracing/path tracing is effectively the successor to this era, and you'd be right on one hand. Personally, though, I feel like the demands of modern polycounts and texture resolution place hard limits on what path tracing can currently accomplish, even on modern hardware. So while it's great to see the truly dark corners of path-traced GI and how, with the right exposure settings, you can get filmic contrast between extreme brights and deep shadows—something you might have otherwise needed baked shadow maps or no ambient light to achieve—I still see the limitations of the approach everywhere.

I'm stuck with a 2080 Super and current consoles, so while it's true I can't always benefit from the best path-tracing options out there, there's a subtlety in the overlapping of different gradients of light and shadow in complex lighting scenes that current ray-tracing solutions can't yet reproduce with tolerable frame rates. Arguably, those older Doom 3-esque lighting engines were better equipped to handle this.

I know Chaos Theory relies on some baked GI in places for certain levels, given their scope and the tech of the time. And I'm not against baked GI or semi-dynamic pre-baked GI in games that otherwise incorporate complex real-time lighting. The Darkness, Prey (2006), and Condemned make extensive use of baked lighting in certain places, yet they still look fantastic and wonderfully dynamic. And with modern hardware and the ability to throw far more shadowed lights into those scenes than devs could have at the time, it'd be pretty simple to mask the baked occlusion almost completely.

But Doom 3 largely doesn't use any baked lighting/GI—maybe none at all. I was always under the impression it had none. And yeah, you see the limitations of no GI at times in the game. Given the hardware limitations at the time and the scope of larger areas where id couldn't throw around as many dynamic lights to cover the space, you can see it hurting for some GI—or at least more lighting in places. But then you encounter a room full of dozens of dynamic lights interacting, overlapping, and influencing each other, and it just works. It’s wonderful—the sheer number of lights makes it so that the utter lack of ambient light only contributes to the scene. The darkest corners are truly dark, but there's still this complex interplay of various intensities of light sources, so you still effectively get some amount of ambient lighting and falloff just by way of artists placing real lights cleverly.

And you just don’t see this kind of lighting much anymore, even in modern games that use a combination of baked GI and real-time lighting. Often, it’s just monotone shadow casting with little variation or dynamic influencing of light sources because that's more efficient at scale and provides a convincing enough illusion at a distance—or even relatively up close—but it just isn't particularly dynamic.

I want to leverage the power of modern PCs to really go all in on old-school dynamic lighting that will run efficiently on modern cards. And don’t worry—I’m not anti-ray tracing. It will eventually be this good. I just want something else in the meantime.

For all the compliments I can give Doom 3—and I think it holds up remarkably well to my 2025 eyes—it’s clear it was hamstrung by many limitations. Character texture/normal map resolution especially. And again, the number of lights or the ability to cast penumbra. Remove those hard limits, and you could do amazing, striking things with dynamic lighting on modern hardware. And I wish someone would take up the cause.

I suppose the Hitman reboots do to some extent, but the complexity of their crowd simulation means they can't go hard on the subtle interactions you see in Doom 3 or Escape from Butcher Bay. Speaking of Butcher Bay, it was a major disappointment to me personally when MachineGames moved from id Tech 5 to id Tech 6. Its lighting, while much of it dynamic, felt far less dynamic than either Butcher Bay or Dark Athena (which relies heavily on baked GI to support it). Especially when The Evil Within existed, running on modified id Tech 5 and far more dynamic.

I've had ChatGPT add capitalization in the above quote

Sorry to nitpick but walls with no capitalization are hard to read. If it changed your text I'm sorry, I haven't checked how good a job it did.

I agree that those games looked incredible for the time. FEAR and Butcher Bay really blew me away.

 

[inlimbo]

It's fine. I prefer lowercase in text/typing but I try to use uppercase here because I've been asked to before. I guess I just forgot as I started typing more, cuz it looks like I started with it, hilariously. Accidentally slipped back into what's natural for me in normal typing, sorry. Do you want me to edit those followup posts with capitalization?

As for that game I went to find. It's this one: https://store.steampowered.com/app/265690/NaissanceE/

I spoke to the developer in the past and he confirmed it's all just hand placed dynamic lights.

 

[Davros]

Genuine Doom3 screenshot

 

[Cyan]

haven't played Chaos Theory, in fact I don't know that game at all. Doom 3 is of course quite a great game, which can still be played these days and it still looks decent. Not the kind of Doom I was used to, but still fun. I only missed the hordes of enemies of the first two iterations of Doom.

A game that I'd LOVE to see recreated some day is Alien Isolation, with path tracing. That has to be a total spectacle.

welcome to the forum. The text is a bit hard to read, smaller paragraphs help.

 

[homerdog]

haven't played Chaos Theory, in fact I don't know that game at all. Doom 3 is of course quite a great game, which can still be played these days and it still looks decent. Not the kind of Doom I was used to, but still fun. I only missed the hordes of enemies of the first two iterations of Doom.

A game that I'd LOVE to see recreated some day is Alien Isolation, with path tracing. That has to be a total spectacle.

welcome to the forum. The text is a bit hard to read, smaller paragraphs help.

If I'm reading this correctly @inlimbo was created in 2007

 

[raytracingfan]

Something like Half-Life 2 RTX - fully dynamic path traced lighting, PBR materials, crisp textures, good geometric detail, but minimal clutter - released a new game could be interesting. Sometimes less is more, especially if having less props strewn around the environment means that the props that are present can be more detailed, dynamic, and responsive.

 

[Nesh]

Genuine Doom3 screenshot
View attachment 13340

I loved that particular moment in the game

 

[Shifty Geezer]

welcome to the forum. The text is a bit hard to read, smaller paragraphs help.

User: inlimbo
Joined: Feb 16, 2007

 

[inlimbo]

Haha, yeah, I'm an old head here but I forget since I'm not here often. Sorry again for the paragraph walls. Definitely at least one block in the OP that could make two. It was just rapidly written and off the cuff.

As for less is more, I can agree. I'm fond of minimalist lighting setups in noir that hinge on strongly directional, simple lighting setups. Half-Life 2's original baked GI is arguably my favorite lighting in games, with Mirror's Edge and the likes of Sonic Unleashed not far behind. Not just in quality for its time but largely because the art direction, the photography/cinematography effectively happening in the placement of those lights, is so strong. I love it. And I loved the idea of Half-Life 2 RTX in theory but I'm unfortunately one of the the vocal minority who doesn't much care for the overhaul.

I think it betrays the game's original art direction and just doesn't complement the intended atmosphere. I also dislike that M-MOD-esque animations and weapon models have been subbed in for the original. Gordon is a layman. He doesn't need "tacti-cool" animations and the original animations better reflect his layman status. Plus the new weapon models are just lesser. Again, too tacticool for HL2's aesthetic. Where the original game's submachinegun looks textured almost as if it was an oil painted element, complementing the game's more painterly art direction, now it just looks like a real gun. That's a sabotaging of art direction to me. But that's me. And I know it's toggleable to some extent, right? The other new models and textures are generally good work, though.

I will give the demo a proper chance, regardless, but HL2 RTX is one example where I actually think an old school real-time lighting approach would work better for a remaster. Especially in combo with the newly baked lightmaps from HL2: Update from some years ago now. Leave that for exteriors and some interior corners, replace some lightmaps with entirely real-time interactions, layer lots of real-time lighting into scenes that otherwise use baked GI and you're golden, IMO.

I know HL2 RTX isn't even out yet, though, so things might change given feedback. I'd prefer less nuclear yellow in Ravenholm, personally.

edit: I also have hangups with PBR materials these days and I'd risk a hesitated guess that ShiftyGeezer might actually agree on this point. When used well, they're fantastic, but as a standardized expectation from the industry now they get misused a lot. And give you slightly less freedom in terms of your lighting setup if you don't realize that you might have to employ blocking and setup techniques similar to the film industry to get lighting to behave how you want given that the way it influences/plays off materials is bound to more physical rules now than it is if you're rendering without PBR.

 

[inlimbo]

because I can no longer edit the above: See a lot of offputtingly way too soft and dry looking wood and rock surfaces these days as a partial consequence of badly used PBR, as one example. Drives me nuts as an artist to see that. Seems so thoughtless as if someone assumed that because this comes from a PBR photogrammetry package it must necessarily look or -be- realistic when a simple assessment by one's eyes, especially if you've ever seen a rock or hell a stylized approximation of one, would tell you "this doesn't look right under sunlight. this looks like it's lit by the softest daycare center lighting ever." But that's my more bristly, frustrated artist side. I get the realities and struggles of game production.

edit: to be clear, as an artist I don't particularly care about realism. I like the surreal more than the real, generally. So I'm not against unnatural lighting, if the above suggests that. Just that bad use of PBR can lead to lighting that just looks unappealing no matter how you look at it, at least to my tastes. It requires careful calibration in my eyes.

 

[inlimbo]

Heh, looks like Industria 2 might scratch something of that itch even if I disagree with a few aesthetic decisions. First game was a diamond in the rough and clearly a love letter to HL2.

And that Painkiller remake/reboot was coincidentally also just announced with a trailer that looks like it's making extensive use of "classical" real-time lighting, even if it's more or less in the id tech 6/7 vein of highly optimized dynamic lighting but lacking the real subtlety of interactions you'd see in Doom 3 et al as a consequence of prioritizing high framerates at large scales with highly complex models. I'm cool with scaling back model complexity a little to facilitate more dynamic lighting. The tradeoff is worth it, especially when you considering how convincing an illusion modern normal maps provide on relatively low poly geometry.

 

[DavidGraham]

Heh, looks like Industria 2 might scratch something of that itch even if I disagree with a few aesthetic decisions. First game was a diamond in the rough and clearly a love letter to HL2.

The first Industria used ray tracing extensively on UE4, the second one is powered by UE5 and will be using Lumen, they will probably offer Hardware Lumen support given their history.

Unreal Engine 5-powered narrative FPS adventure game, INDUSTRIA 2, gets first official gameplay trailer

Blackmill Games has released the first official gameplay trailer for INDUSTRIA 2, which will be powered by Unreal Engine 5.

www.dsogaming.com

 

[inlimbo]

Makes sense. Dunno why I thought old school rendering. Looks good in any case.

I should be clear that there are arguably more games with great lighting these days on average than there ever have been and it doesn't really matter if the solution is interactive or not. Sometimes it doesn't especially need to be to capture a great bit of art direction. I just love interactive lighting. It's just sorta inherently cool, much like interactive physics.

edit: And Lumen is a perfectly valid solution I'd like to see employed on less complex meshes so devs could really throw lights at it. I love its use in Jusant, for example.

 

[inlimbo]

Oh wow, Obenseuer has received a major graphical overhaul and seems to be tapping into some of my desires here:

Obenseuer on Steam

Obenseuer is an urban survival RPG game, where you become a property manager of a rundown unfinished tenement building, in an isolated quarantine district of Obenseuer. Maintain and upgrade your tenement for rent, uncover the secrets of this infamous district and grow your wealth with your craft.

store.steampowered.com

 

[Color me Dan]

Heh, looks like Industria 2 might scratch something of that itch even if I disagree with a few aesthetic decisions. First game was a diamond in the rough and clearly a love letter to HL2.

I really enjoyed the first Industria! I haven't got RT capable hardware, but it looked nice enough on my old 5700 XT regardless. And I thought the story was touching and wonderfully surreal.

Gotta say I'm liking this thread as a more passive observer. I really enjoyed the visuals and aesthetics of Doom 3, and the horror elements. The harsh shadows fit that game to a tee. It would be interesting to see a slightly more modern take. I felt that Thief 3 had a similar feel to it, where the dynamic shadows became a character of its own. Because I agree with you, just experiencing the interactivity of the shadows was/is fun in and of itself.

A Fatal Frame like game would be perfect for it. The flash of the camera, the light and shadows guiding and hiding you. And the monsters hiding there as well.

 

[Davros]

So Industria is currently £2.54 (-85%) on steam until 3rd April, is it worth it?
Edit: already in my Steam library

 

[Cyan]

So Industria is currently £2.54 (-85%) on steam until 3rd April, is it worth it?
Edit: already in my Steam library

thanks! Got it out of curiosity and I'm also curious whether I can run it natively at 360fps or not.