Shadowmapping terrain

I use a quite "straigt forward" approach in C-script with traces, and painting pixels

For the project I have to do a thousand other things like cinematics, triggers, unit-actions/spells etc

So i cant put much time into the shadowbaking for now.

i will come back to your suggestions later in the project.

There is a quite easy approach to render soft lights direclty while you raytrace the pixels of your terrain.

Dont use a single point for the sun - use an area. If you use a squared area then you have 4 points available. Every pixel of the terrain traces to all 4 points.

So if it happens that it hits all 4 of them then it gets full sun light.

If it hits none it is in full shadow.

If it hits only 2 of them it is in half shadow.

The size of the rectangled sun influences the size of the soft-shadows.

The calculation will take 4-times your current time but it might be worth it.
The quality can be better, when you rotate the rectangle like this:
Code:

---

  x 
x x x
  x

---

I did that in the previous shadowrenderer.
But the probelem is, that the Terrain does not have a resolution
high enough, to make the "curves" in the terrain look smooth.
So when the part of the terrain has a thin angle, so that it is almost in the shadow,
it will be drawn darker. But this makes hard edges between the faces of the terrain,
looking unrealistic.

Thats why I want only tweo choises "dark" or "lit". The smoothing removes hard edges in the
postprocessing.

The "fine" shadow/light differences will then come from the dynamic lightning of the terrain.


in the video you can see that the terrain looks quite nice ingame:

http://de.youtube.com/watch?v=hyRrjEBkA6g



Here with wather. Its quite Flat, so i have to look for a shader that makes it look good, but
does not drain performance.

wow, i really like your style damocles. its looking simple but effective. thats a good basis for an fps.

can you tell me how you move your units? because i get strange behaviour described in this thread:

http://www.coniserver.net/ubbthreads/showflat.php/Cat/0/Number/814408/an/0/page/0#Post814408

when i move something with a constant speed pretty fast in windowed mode. have you tried running in windowed mode?

@ Damocles:

That looks nice and flexible
Thanks for commenting your shadow methode.

Cheers

Frazzle

The demo on the video was actually taken from a windowed game. (fraps only recorded the window)

I only use fps_max=60; and everything with a time factor.
no timesmooth.

In theory, the movement can only be fluent, if there is no timesmooth,
as this is exactly the timeshift between two frames.

But i think there is a problem when the framerate drops below 16FPS.

Since i have a pretty fast computer now, and alway write the code as fast as possibele, I dont
run into major problems.
Its another thing with slower computers. But on my laptop, the game runs quite smooth too, even when
it is already 5 years old.

I am also very reluctant to shaders/effects, especially if they do not improve the feeling of the game.

The only shader I use is the multi-terraintexture-shader from the templates. (about the only think I find useful for me
from the template source)