I imagine that Malcolm's point was that in real life there is no fundamental distinction between "specular" and "reflection" lighting unlike the hacks used for 3D rendering systems. Game engines create a schism between blurred-out reflection (approximated by specular lighting) and crisp reflection (approximated by…
You've never seen an engine that does straight up realtime reflection? It's possible although hideously expensive. You can do it in ut3 in a limited way. The problem with regular specular approximation is that it only uses light from the lightsource. It doesn't use light from any other source (such as reflections from…
I just want to know when we'll get non point lights to play with in engines. Spherical harmonics and light maps are good hacks in the meantime, but they don't respect the character moving around in the environment the way a light with a 3d position would. I can't imagine trying to make a good portrait with just bare light…
Sure MoP. I didn't mean to compare megatextures being a equivilant development to square specular. And I'm certainly not trying to suggest Carmack doesn't know what he's talking about. I'm not smart, or arrogant, enough attempt that. If he had said something like "we had to choose between allocating resources on developing…