I'm not satisfied.

by uberfoop , Seattle-ish, Tuesday, June 11, 2013, 14:16 (3980 days ago) @ ferrex

It was a stencil buffer shadow implementation, and the limiting factor (as I understand it) was fill rate on the Xbox. The same sort of implementation worked out for Doom3 due to their tight environments and stark art style, but that city environment was essentially the worst possible case for that lighting engine.

It was scrapped because we could either have lighting, or more than 5 AI at a time. It's too bad, it was a neat environment to drive around in.

I have a mental image of shadow volumes cascading down from each and every building to cover screen-space 100 times over, and it's amazing. The Xbox is screaming "**** OVERDRAW, JUST PORT THIS TO PS2 ALREADY YOU MONSTERS, AAAAAAAHHH!!!!!!"

And that's how Halo became a Sony exclusive franchise and saved the Playstation 2 from its poor market performance.