Er, env_projectedtexture, otherwise known as the flashlight? Penumbra just means soft edge, the flashlight has soft edges. I guess from the portal 2 clips that they're going to see wider use in newer engine versions.
Penumbra most certainly does not mean just soft edge, though that probably won't stop someone trying to fake a penumbra soft shadows from calling their method a method for penumbra shadows, but I was referring to actual penumbra shadows* so the point is moot regardless. *After all, why settle for less when the aim is to kill Dubee's framerate?
What the fuck is that thing that you call penumbra shadows. GI using photon maps? Path tracing? Whatever is good enough approximation (as in looks like the real thing) is good enough in games. Doesn't matter whether it's integral over hemisphere or 10 texture lookups multiplied by each other to get local occlusion. Practically no one whines about AWP's scope glass where you see environment map and not the correct reflection.
I'm not fond of editing posts after someone has replied to them, but the error in my post was just too egregious to let past and is now fixed. Other than that, I can think of no response to M00tant. (After all, it's based on an out-dated post. Time travel is difficult.)
Actually I whine about that, I hate source's cubemap system, I try to just make an unobtrusive environment map and use it across the entire map as cubemaps produce too many little lighting bugs if you use them like the wiki suggests.
Yes. Keef made like 10 already. And he didn't even use any specialized tools for it. Just a manually painted heightmap where normal map was initial reference.