Quake III engine not good at shadows?

[DayGlow]

I've noticed that the 2 recent games based on the Quake III engine really choke when they try to do detailed shadows. (MOHAA and JKII) Is this a limitation of the engine? I have a 1Ghz AMD, a GF4 ti 4400 and 512mb of ram and still the egine really slows down drawing shadows. I ask because when you look at a game like Operation Flashpoint where it draws a detailed shadow for every object in the game (there can be like a few dozen men, and all the trees and bushes infront of me, all projecting shadows and no slowdown).

 

I hope there will be a patch in the future that would take advantage of DX8 code such as stencil buffers or pixil shaders so that the shadows can be drawn without slowdown.

 

It just amazes me that when there are 5+ people on the screen the fps drop from 60+ to the low teens when volumemetric shadows are enabled. Seems to be a limit in the engine code.

 

COLINMAN

[Kordeth]

I agree--with Volumetric shadows on, my machine (a dual PIII 550 with 512 mb RAM and a Hercules 3DProphet III) slowed to near unplayability at several points throughout the game with volumetric shadows on, and the shadows often looked ugly and had display glitches (enemy shadows appearing through walls, my own shadow appearing fifty feet down the hall and attached to nothing, etc). At one point, I became convinced I was being stalked by a Defel waiting to kill me!

[toolboi]

Important notes:

1. Flashpoint has MUCH simpler graphics (I often compare it to the later generation fo quake 1 games such as JK or Halflife).

2. Flashpoint does not (to my knowledge) have volumetric shadows. It has the same type of shadows as seen in games like Drakken. I beleive its dont by drawing a sprite over the ground. Notice how your own shadow will cast on you in JO? That wont happen in the other games.