Abandoned yet powerful technique.

[Alexios]

In game design, back in the N64 days, we was capable of making games look downright amazing with realistic lighting, it was a rare (literally a Rareware AND rare) technique that never got used. I'm talking about Global Illumination that runs on N64s

. 

This is called VCOLGI, or Vertex Color Global Illumination. This is all done by storing Raytracing calculations (Raytracing is very old but just recently got good enough to be able to be used live.) In vertex data, each point has a color data which is multiplied over the geometry.  Along with some good texturing,

 

You can use this technique combined and multiplied over the textures for a dazzling effect.

 

All running on the N64. Here are more examples. 

 

 

 

[{GN} Isaac]

Honestly looks amazing 

[Alexios]

Keep in mind, this technique is _faster_ than actual lighting and can hold a solid 60 FPS if the game was optimized enough.

[Danutercisd]

Hell, there's only three posts in this section, and I wanna comment. This looks amazing indeed. I think if this was utilized more, it would make today's games even more beautiful. Perhaps combined with some of the techniques done today, it would be an awesome to see this, combined with that. It would just be tricky at first, because Microsoft might try to claim this method as theirs, or some other bullshit. 

[Rubik]

Need more content like this. Very cool!