Shadows in John Carmack's Next Engine

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Just got word that Anthony Tan aka the "Reverend" has thrown up his chat with id Software's John Carmack about shadowing techniques he plans on using in his next game engine ! It's well worth a Read.

Shadowing (and lighting) has always been important not only for the overall quality of 3D graphics in games but for the immersive factor in games.

As some of you may know, Doom3 uses stencil volumes for its shadows. And as some of you may know, the man responsible for its choice as implementation in that game/engine is John Carmack. In his QuakeCon 2004 keynote address, John had mentioned about his experiments with shadow buffers, the techniques pros and its cons. After listening to that Quakecon address, I'd asked John about which technique -- continue with stencils or use buffers -- he'd be using for the post-Doom3-engine and he had replied (at the time, around Nov'04) :

Shadows in John Carmack's Next Engine