I was on fileshack the other day trying to get the Neocron demo… and I look at the “most popular downloads” list. I see something called Tenebrae among the usual crowd of Halflife mods and Quake patches. I click on it and it is a small 3 meg file that supposedly adds stencil shadows, bump mapping, and per-pixel lighting to the original Quake game.

Think DoomIII, there are a few games that use stencil shadows right now, but none that use per-pixel lighting, and few that use bump-mapping more than cursorily. I’m thinking they used Quake to experiment because the whole sourcecode was released by ID some time ago.

Anyways, I dug and found my old Quake CD, and installed it again. Then I unpacked the Tenebrae files into the directory and fired it up.

I was stunned. I don’t know if people who never played Quake before can appreciate it, but you have to notice the shading and shadow effects. Everything is darker with the true lighting and shadows flip and turn everywhere… Rocket blasts and nailguns make the rooms light up with each pulse. It’s gorgeous.

Without further ado… below are 2 screenies. You can get all the screenshots I saved at:

www.drzy.com/images/tenebrae/page_01.htm