Like I said. The game uses a combination of different tricks for the outdoor and MP levels.

Firt of all... <snip>

That sounds very plausible, and would be the way to go for Raven to create good performing and good looking maps. Is this information you deducted from the screenshots or has there been any kind of announcement made regarding the technical aspects of the engine?

Like I said. The game uses a combination of different tricks for the outdoor and MP levels.

Firt of all, it uses something called "deluxe mapping". What this is, is a pre-generated lightmap for the level, that has normals information too. If you were to load a level up with a deluxe map, you would see that it looks exactly the same as Doom 3. Then, anything that needs to move, or any lights etc that wont be static, will be computed in real time. This makes the gameplay a lot faster. It also uses tiny, smaller pointlights and heavy use of ambient lighting. Point lights (just lights), are heavily fillrate bound, and so the smaller they are, the better, but the smaller they are, the less shadow you get (hence the lack of shadows in the Q4 MP pics/vids, and the small ones too). Ambient lighting in a PPL engine like Quake 4 is jsut a piontlight that doesn't change the specular map, and doesn't cast shadows (making it VERY fast).

This means that when you play Quake 4, it will look a bit flat in some places, because ambient lights light the normals directly from the front. But it will be fast.

Couple this with the fact per poly hit detection has gone for online play, and an improved netcode, as well as dozens of other tweaks, and you can be sure Quake 4 MP will be smooth, much much smoother than Doom 3 at least.

true. but so does your sig

I'm looking in the direction of RockCrusher