this may be a stupid question, but is there any way to get good lighting effects like Doom 3?
That is not posible yet(if you dont can “verry” god scripting)
It will come I think 
Doom3 appears to use more-or-less standard lighting techniques
but with displacement mapping (look it up sometime) the polycount is high enough that you can see some pretty small details
and the shadows are done using stencil shadows, which without exploiting some crazy hole in blender’s python interface (or adding it to the source tree, or using Blender.BGL in 2.23) it isn’t possible to do the same in blender.
You can get some amazing shading effects in the blender game engine with the radiosity solver. You should try to experimint, it can really produce amazing looking results
you know the question was about game blender right?
(though a radiosity result could be stored into vertex colors, this is slow (to produce and run) and not the same as doom3)
maybe I am just rambling caustic nonsence
As I understood he was asking how to get good looking lighting into Blender. You can set the radiosity solver to not create extra geometry if you want, meaning it can act just as a “vertex colorer” producing good-looking atmosphere and lighting. Scenes that have gone through the radiosity solver have alot more dimention to them I think.
Doom 3 only uses stencil shadows (on every single piece of geometry!!)
Blender’s game engine does not use stencil shadows.
I was actually reffering to game blender[/quote][/list]