The community has already improved shadow rendering performance by (at least) 1.5x. http://forums.inside3d.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=3491&start=45

Sikkmod already has an option to brighten the Ambient light so that shadowed areas have better visibility. No need to wait, get it now. Better Ambient light rendering will surely happen with source modifications.

Please make sure to read some technical documents about BRINK before posting: http://charles.hollemeersch.net/node/58 Otherwise known as Virtual Texturing see Bethesda Press: http://www.bethsoft.com/eng/games/games_brink.html

Thanks for the update! If you get a chance, stop by The Dark Mod forums to discuss your findings. http://forums.thedarkmod.com/

Megatextures still have potential. They just need to be more conservative instead of trying to make everything out of them. Mixing traditional textures and Megatextures gave the game BRINK it's distinctive look and the technique could be extended further. John Carmack was trying too hard to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food A more realistic approach would've been optimal.

Stencil shadows haven't been removed. Just the depth-fail method (which may mean a performance penalty unless Carmack worked some new magic...) Even without the shadows, the per-pixel dynamic lighting is still valuable and new shadow methods can be implemented anyway (especially with so much of the engine tracking light positional effects).

Yes:

Hexen: Edge of Chaos:
http://www.moddb.com/mods/hexen-edge-of-chaos
Classic Doom 3:
http://www.moddb.com/mods/classic-doom-3
The Ruiner:
http://www.moddb.com/mods/ruiner
In Hell:
http://doom3.filefront.com/file/;83607
Shambler's Castle:
http://www.moddb.com/mods/shamblers-castle
Serengrove:
http://www.moddb.com/games/doom-iii/addons/sp-serengrove-tudor-town-of-doom

The Dark Mod, a Doom 3 total conversion which turns the game into something similar to the "Thief" series games, will now be able to optimize and fix render, AI, and physics. This is a day for celebration! www.thedarkmod.com http://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

Yes, lower IPC was a risky move but it was a gamble that they had to take with this strategy. The whole idea still makes sense: 1) Specialize on threaded server workloads on the CPU 2) Increase the pipeline stages for clocking head-room at the die shrink nodes (Even though they backed-off a bit, Intel will do this too) 3) Get Application developers to move to GP-GPU 4) Next-gen Fusion 5) Now you have x86 only doing minimal or perfunctory work while the on-die GPU handles the muscle. I don't know why people are applauding Intel for marginal jumps in FP capability and a hand-full of decode tricks when we are on the cusp of a CPU with MOUNTAINS of Floating Point and parallelism. You think that PowerPC had an advantage in media-rich applications with AVX? Think of how crazy good Fusion will be if the plan comes together. That CPU will be a media-rich messiah! Sorry if I don't share your excitement over opening Word documents quicker because of super cool x86 decode tricks. I want a CPU with a next-gen attitude.

Perhaps they are practicing image replacement for Google maps images to censor forbidden areas? They can use those markings for calibration.

The Dark Mod team is very excited about all the possible bug fixes and performance improvements made possible by this release. If you are a fan of the Thief games, you should check out this mod: http://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dark-mod www.thedarkmod.com

I believe I've read that the real speed limit is 100 kilometers per second. Any faster any the electron-shell stability of most atoms will become significant enough to induce heavy thermal increases.? (Essentially, you will cook as if in a microwave oven,,,) As far as "going fast" is concerned, the easiest solution would be to build a large mag-lev train in space. It would be like a large particle accelerator so you could get the ship up to just below the speed of light as it circled around, The problem, of course, is the 100kmps limitation as originally stated (if true)... Well, the other problem is "stopping"...