Sonic 06's cut content is still in the game, just switched off

The Missed Opportunities of Sonic 06

While building Marathon Recompiled, a Sonic 06 decompilation project, Isaac Marovitz discovered that much of the game's missing visual fidelity—bump maps, complex geometry, point lights—still exists in the code but is disabled for performance. The most-used shader only supports basic vertex lighting, and point lights often fail due to an over-limit bug. He explains the shader variants and render scripts, and why restoring these features is harder than flipping a switch.