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The Early History of Deferred Shading and Lighting
At the 2004 Game Developer Conference Matt Pritchard (one of my coworkers at the now closed Ensemble Studios who wrote Age of Empires 2's graphics code), John Brooks (CTO and my boss at Blue Shift Inc., the graphics programmer on "Super Mario Wacky Worlds") and I came out of the cold and gave a
The results could then be further processed in the powerful fixed point combiner units, where you could rotate the vector again, approximately normalize it, compute stuff like N.L or N.H, etc. The final shipping game rendered 2D n-gons at constant Z depths that were guaranteed to conservatively surround each omni light's screenspace projection. While walking to lunch one day during development, we were discussing how to accomplish transparent water surfaces in a deferred renderer, without having to resort to writing a separate forward shading pipeline.
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