soft shadows idea...

Wouldnt it be possible to render the results of the stencil buffer test to texture..and then could apply a blur shader to it and put it on a view entity.. you could get nice soft shadows that way.

first you need a blur shader;-) have you? and you would need to calculate the distance to the light because the shadow needs to be sharp when near and smooth when far away .

I dont have a blur shader currently.. although i would assume some research into gaussian blurring algorithms or multi-tap blurring would be sufficient to do it. as far as the distance calculation...my plan would be to only do a subtle blur so overall all the shadows into the distance would *appear* blurrier because they are smaller and have less detail. I dont think a blur shader would allow you to assign different blurs to different pixels.. at least not a simple and fast one..

You could also render to texure your scene on some screen aligned sprite or quad and then proces that picture (dunno like if color is 0,0,0 then apply blur to that spot)

There is a fake blur method here in the forum, look for soft filter topic

LOL here are some fake soft shadows

http://dimenzije.topcities.com/softshadows.jpg

copy paste the link to your browser

yeah the problem with that method is that its not really blurred.. its just lower res and filtered.. looks cruddy ... also the idea is that the stencil shadows wouldnt be rendered to the main view only to a texture.. then processed and put on a view entity

Taros,

GS Shadows are poor, but those are the worst I could imagine. Better to have no shadow.

The new stencil shadows that are in baeta kickbutt, but currently a little slow... the shadows bend and contour, but ar still hard edged...

I don't know how the stencil shadows are rendered but the same trick might apply from the GamaSutra article regarding blur which is to use a mipmap of the shadow texture instead of a full resolution texture of the shadow. Conitec would need to impliment it themselves on the stencil shadow though.

yes the blur isnt the problem really.. the problem is rendering the stencil buffer results to a texture.. thats something that would have to be in the engine.