Tenebrae (software)
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- This article is about a game engine. For other meanings see Tenebrae.
Tenebrae (Latin for "shadows") is a GNU General Public Licensed first-person shooter engine, one of many based on the Quake engine. It was created by Charles Hollemeersch. Tenebrae is available for Microsoft Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X platforms.
It is notable for implementing stencil shadows and per-pixel lighting. The potential to use these rendering technologies in a PC gaming engine was already proven by their being known to be part of the game Doom 3 (also by id Software), but the Tenebrae engine became publicly available in late 2002 before Doom 3 was released.
A much improved version under the name Tenebrae 2 has been under construction since mid-2003. Tenebrae 2 features major optimizations in the rendering engine (with extensive use of hardware acceleration) and full support for Quake III Arena maps (as opposed to the less feature-rich Quake map format). Although it is also based on the original Quake source-code, the Tenebrae 2 engine is capable of producing graphics which rival those of many modern closed-source engines (Doom 3 engine, CryENGINE, Source, etc.)
