I feel old because the post talks about these techniques as if they're surprising innovations or compromises for more accurate simulations, but most of these tricks were industry standard for 3D games in the early 2000's. Much of the science about lighting, physics, and rendering we take for granted today was mostly unknown; developers just did the best they could with the basic tech that was available. Back then, just the fact that we could put thousands of hardware accelerated textured polygons on the screen was a miracle to us.
While Max Payne was cutting-edge, a lot of what made the visuals appear impressive was due to hand-tweaking by a team of highly skilled artists and designers, who were probably using ridiculously primitive tooling. Pretty much every realistic 3D game of this era had to make do with low-res diffuse textures, prebaked lighting, mostly fixed-function rendering, pre-scripted interactions, and particle dynamics that were basically just a few lines of C++. Other early-2000's games like Serious Sam, Halo, and Metroid Prime also managed to create immersive visuals with very limited tech, using the same techniques as Max Payne.
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