GTA 3 Classic per pixel lighting with shadows. 2026

Описание: Hello everyone!

I wanted to share a little passion project of mine—a demo of an updated lighting system for GTA 3 and Vice City. It's starting to look pretty neat, don't you think?

At the end of 2025, I managed to update the water rendering system, adding volumetric waves and reflections. You can see more in this video:    • GTA 3 Shader Water test  

Then, right at the very end of 2025, I succeeded in implementing a real-time shadow system for the sun (a little New Year's gift for myself 😉). My goal was to push the original game engine to its limits, so I avoided directly using DirectSurfaces or RenderTargets. Similar to my water rendering pipeline, a secondary camera is created for shadows, pointed along the sun's vector and positioned slightly above the main camera. The game scene is rendered from this camera's perspective into a standard RGBA8888 texture containing depth values. Later, during the main scene render, the depth of a scene pixel is compared with the depth value from the shadow texture to determine if that pixel is in shadow. If it is, sunlight illumination is not applied.

It's far from perfect yet. The lack of shadow cascades forces me to use a very high shadow map resolution, which isn't great for performance. I made two videos to demonstrate the shadow system: one with HD textures, normal maps, HQ car models, and other visual improvements (   • GTA 3 FIRST dynamic shadows test  ), and another on a nearly vanilla version of the game (classic textures with only detail maps applied, mostly original car models)    • GTA 3 Classic per pixel lighting with shad...  

Just to be fully transparent, what you're seeing is a very early and rough version. This isn't really a mod yet, more of a personal experiment. The code and shaders rely on various tricks and shortcuts, so there are bound to be some bugs that might affect visuals or gameplay.

My goal is to slowly refine this system until it's stable and works exactly as I envision. Only then will I be able to turn it into a proper, publishable mod.

This is just a hobby I work on in my spare time, outside of my main job. Also, life gets busy, so there might be stretches of several months where I can't even get to the computer to work on this. Progress will likely be slow and inconsistent.

If there's anyone out there with experience digging into the code of these classic games or who knows their way around DirectX 9, I'd love to chat! It would be great to exchange knowledge and ideas—collaboration always makes things more interesting.

P.S. For some context: I'm not a professional programmer. I only started learning from scratch at the beginning of 2024, so I'm still figuring things out as I go.

Please don't ask for a mod download link yet. Once this evolves into a proper mod, I'll try to start a topic on GTAForums and possibly a Discord server so you can follow the development and maybe even participate. I'm happy to discuss technical details if you're interested. I was also very pleased to see that the LC'01 project team, inspired by this work, implemented similar lighting in their own project:    • GTA LC01 - Realtime Illumination Test  

Thanks for your interest and understanding! And thank you all for your attention, comments, and for watching the videos!