Hodgeman, I'm a little puzzled about what you said here:
Besides "deferred shadows", regular deferred shading can be implemented in the same "recycling" manner without making use of a full-screen shadow collector. Instead you simply render the shadow map(s) for a light, and then perform the deferred light accumulation for that light, then goto next light, etc...
Keep in mind that I only have a rough idea of how deferred shading works at present, though (as you can see from my other thread) I'm strongly considering that route. So are you saying deferred-shading makes the usual deferred shadows technique unecessary, and there's a simpler way to do it?
Either way, I'd just like to verify that i understand the idea of (ordinary) deferred shadows properly. Here's my current understanding ( I admit some of this is based off intuition)
for each light: render all objects from lights point of view (depth only) into shadow map render all objects from cameras point of view (depth only) testing for shadows. if it is in the shadow, set the full screen texture pixel to 1. blur the shadow texture render all objects, darkening each pixel if the texture element is 1.
Of course, objects not in view of the light can be culled out.
Is this the right idea?