I find it more plausible that nobody at the office actually touched the game itself. 

but then as a bitter developer of three long years I don't have a lot of faith in publishers 

3 whole years, huh? Just wait. :) 

Iv seen such games in russia (lame games re-using art from the other games)
even more so Iv had some communication with the ppl who do them. But thats Russia - the land of the free (from copyright laws) :) 

ask around about the lunaran bitter. if I were a microbrew I'd be an acquired taste. 

Somewhere in a Kentish pub, three old wankers are getting pissed up right now.

Bang on the money.

Lunaran, you develop bitter? Sounds like a cool job; games dev just makes you cynical and sarcastic. 

Lunaran is the bitterist motherfucker I know. 

"ask around about the lunaran bitter. if I were a microbrew I'd be an acquired taste."

You must also be pretty young. Because, after awhile, the bitter thing gets tiresome and you move on. ;) 

 

or you move out 

I only saw screenshots of it, and it was on some Quake mappers website. He had quite a lot of levels on there. I think his nickname started with "T"??

The levels in particular I'm interested in is the one(s) were he used that Scourge of Armagon big marble white brick texture.

Any ideas? 

Tyrann? Did Moonlight Assault use that white brick?

http://disenchant.net/ 

http://www.quaddicted.com/spmaps.html
click on the "author" link to sort by names. 

Wasn't him, but I managed to find a link to the person from the page you gave. It was Tronyn and the map was Coven Of Ebony. 

http://www.tgdaily.com/html_tmp/content-view-37925-113.html 

But who needs performance anyway, when you've got omg shiny shiny things? gg Intel, working hard on what matters most to gamers everywhere: gloss. 

raytracing is cool and nice and all, and just needs hw support. 

BlackDog

That may be missing the point somewhat. Realtime ray tracing would lead to a very unified looking world where everything is lit in exactly the same way, every reacts properly to lights, etc. It would lead to more immersion which I think would be hard to argue against as a negative. 

There's nothing to stop rasterising hardware from using a unified lighting model. See Doom 3 and Stalker.

Intel is pushing raytracing because they'd really love to sell a bunch of expensive hardware, and they can't compete with GPU performance and quality on traditional rasterising tasks. That shows very clearly in these shots: there's flat shading on the models, crappy texture filtering, terrible performance, and pathetic resolution.

There's also shiny things. Well, colour me unimpressed. 

 

"There's nothing to stop rasterising hardware from using a unified lighting model. See Doom 3 and Stalker."

Ray tracing can bounce light. No current real time engine bounces light. And I will all but guarantee that Doom3 and STALKER are using lightmaps in many areas.

"That shows very clearly in these shots: there's flat shading on the models, crappy texture filtering, terrible performance, and pathetic resolution. "

Eh, that's art assets that were designed for a completely different lighting model. Once the technology is more solidified a killer art team would make it look great. 

I'm not getting into this discussion cause I have no clue, but having gone through most of the Doom3 source maps, no it does not use lightmaps. It actually takes some hacking about with the shaders to even get lightmaps in. 

Doom 3 was completely unified and realtime. Stalker used lightmaps on the world, but for occlusion and not lighting. It also implemented a limited form of bounced lighting, by the way. :)

As for the assets, I wonder if they aren't normalmapped in those shots because of issues getting the shading right or because of the extra performance hit (hgh quality texturing is expensive in a raytracer). 

It'd be awesome if doom3 had lightmap support of some sort. 

gaytracing is so far behind its not funny