Arcturus

From what I read Stalker engine supported light baking, which I guess helps with big daytime scenes like that. That's something Darkmod doesn't have. What else is missing? That is something that's testable. You could make concrete comparison of the same 3d mesh lit in different (non-pbr) engines.

Even at this tiny resolution (640x480px) nobody would mistake this for a photo. There are still giveaways typical for real time rendering. Ambient occlusion effect looks unrealistic, those objects on the left aren't lit properly. People struggle with photo realism even in offline rendering. But yes, the gap will slowly close. And don't get me wrong, I am all for improvements in darkmod's engine.

There were no photorealistic games 15 years ago and even today you can hardly call newest games that.

https://www.gog.com/pl/game/total_chaos_mod

@JavaGod Stencil shadows were performance heavy and kind of ugly. We have shadow maps now so that's solved. What the game could use is some kind of dynamic indirect light system. Probes or screen-space global illumination, screen-space reflections. Switching to a full blown PBR was deemed too ambitious, but having proper image masks in materials would be nice. There's plenty of little things that could be improved and bugs that could be fixed on the rendering side and also AI.

I updated walk_alerted, walk_lantern and walk_torch to fix the elbows. I swapped walk_alert_hammer, walk_alerted_bow and walk_alerted_torch with new versions. Old animations were stiff.

md5_import_blender_52.py Updated md5mesh / md5anim import script for Blender 5.

Youtube has now an option to AI generate thumbnail for your video.

There's a bad looking normal map that doesn't fit the style of the original texture in one screenshot, textures with smooth specular reflections that look off in another. I'm sure you can make it look nice with enough work.