» Sat May 28, 2011 3:53 pm
I hope to Azura that they have a deffered pipeline, in which case yes everything you mentioned is possible. If, for bizarre reasons I can't imagine, they don't, then no.
The easiest way to explain deffered rendering is this: From the first polygonal games till about 2007/8 ever game used a technique called "forward" rendering. This mean that for each polygon that a light hit that poly had to be rendered twice. Once normally, once with the light, and then combined. So the cost of rendering extra lights went up quickly.
With the advent of deffered shading (first seen heavily in GTA4 and that awful Alone in the Dark) this was no longer the case. Instead all the information of what's being rendered is gathered into a so called "g-buffer" and then lights are rendered as spheres. This means that normal anti-aliasing is out (no way to tell how an extra sample is lit) and transparencies are hard, but a lot of lights can be shown for a lot less cost.
Right now if you're game is running a deferred pipeline you just aren't cool man. It's one of the reasons Unreal Engine 3 isn't keeping up on it's looks versus newer engines.