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Re: soft shadows?
[Re: TWO]
#94926
10/21/06 13:09
10/21/06 13:09
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Joined: Sep 2003
Posts: 1,037 Budapest, Hungary
DEX
Serious User
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Serious User
Joined: Sep 2003
Posts: 1,037
Budapest, Hungary
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Exactly, if he is bored. And I think this is first thing we need with this engine, better SHADOW system. So please Jcl make this thing better for us. Current shadow system forces me to loose 2-3 more time that I need if shadows are good, then I dont need to find sollution in another programs to fake them like in this screen: That is a realy time consuming for nothing
DEXSOFT-GAMES.COM
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Re: soft shadows?
[Re: Matt_Aufderheide]
#94927
10/22/06 20:47
10/22/06 20:47
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Joined: Aug 2000
Posts: 7,490
Orange Brat
Senior Expert
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Senior Expert
Joined: Aug 2000
Posts: 7,490
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@DEX: My last post was related to dynamic shadows and not terrain static shadows. I don't use terrain, so it doesn't matter to me at this point. However, a lot of people do, and it is a highly requested feature that needs to be addressed if it already hasn't. Quote:
Quote:
There's nothing wrong with the current system
Wrong. The current system is extremely primitive.. allowing only one shadow casting light at a time. This is a big problem for realism...plus you cant blend shadows correctly with the lighting passes and ambient, it doesnt look natural in most cases.
The current shadow system need a lot of improvemtns before it has any value.
I'm all for advancements, however multiple shadows don't make or break a game or engine, nor is it any less realistic the way it is now and has been in almost every other engine for years. There are still plenty of games coming out that use both static lightmaps and an oval blob shadow for the player's shadow. And, they sell pretty well, too. We're not all trying to make the next Crysis or FEAR. Last time I checked it was bad gameplay vs. good gameplay that people remember and games in the good category live on no matter what they look like.
My User Contributions master list - my initial post links are down but scroll down page to find list to active links
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Re: soft shadows?
[Re: nkl]
#94929
10/23/06 07:38
10/23/06 07:38
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Joined: Nov 2004
Posts: 7,121 Potsdam, Brandenburg, Germany
Machinery_Frank
Senior Expert
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Senior Expert
Joined: Nov 2004
Posts: 7,121
Potsdam, Brandenburg, Germany
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Please look at the current games and even at render pictures. You will notice very fast: Realism does not come mainly from polygons or textures. It comes in the most cases from lighting. Lights and shadows are the key. Take a good scene an analyze what you see. I do that very often since I do texture creating at the moment. The same texture looks dull, non-metallic and flat without lighting. Now comes the light, a normal map, a specular map and even a depth map - the texture begins to look realistic and it starts to reflect light in certain spots. With added shadows the scene becomes almost real. This little story just tells you that real artists especially need one tool: lights and shadows to make professional scenes. So I understand DEX very much. This is the part what makes the artwork impressive. No matter how many good scripting functions are in the engine. What does that mean for A6/A7? We need for future updates static and dynamic lights in combination with shaders (normal and parallax mapping with specular highlights). I am very happy that Conitec is going this way now. They want to provide shaders in a template and they want to improve the scene management to use shaders on top of level geometry. So it could become what I have in mind. But DEX is still missing shadows on terrain. Did you ever create a terrain with shadows? I did. It is a big amount of work. When you use the template shader then you have to paint the shadows or you have to generate them in another tool like Freeworld3D, Gile(s) or in your rendering application. After that you import all in WED. You do not see the tiled textures and you have to place models almost blind. Did you ever check IceX2 (a tool from a forum user). This one shows how it can be done. It is a terrain in-game editor that places objects, paints terrain and calculates shadows for the hills (but unfortunately not for level or model geometry). At the end you got my vote for the best lighting and shadow system available Regards, Frank
Models, Textures and Games from Dexsoft
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Re: soft shadows?
[Re: Orange Brat]
#94930
10/23/06 08:22
10/23/06 08:22
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Joined: Oct 2003
Posts: 4,131
Matt_Aufderheide
Expert
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Expert
Joined: Oct 2003
Posts: 4,131
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Quote:
Last time I checked it was bad gameplay vs. good gameplay that people remember and games in the good category live on no matter what they look like.
This is an irrellevant statement. No one said anything about gameplay. We were talking about the A6 shadows, and why they need improvement.
You can design your game however you want, whats that got to do the the shadowing system?
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Re: soft shadows?
[Re: TWO]
#94931
10/23/06 09:34
10/23/06 09:34
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Joined: Jan 2003
Posts: 1,142 California
Daedelus
Senior Developer
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Senior Developer
Joined: Jan 2003
Posts: 1,142
California
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Quote:
As JCL said, the current shadow system is running on the cpu, thats why itīs extrem slow; But he will fix that, sometimes.. maybe... if he gets bored
Yeah, really. I think this shadow debate has been going on for about two years. How many programmers does Conitec have around now?
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Re: soft shadows?
[Re: jcl]
#94933
10/23/06 10:18
10/23/06 10:18
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Joined: Jan 2003
Posts: 4,305
Damocles
Expert
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Expert
Joined: Jan 2003
Posts: 4,305
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The easyest thing would be to make a shadowbaker within WED, that accounts for BSP Blocks and (chosen) models, and also take the lightinformation from the levelligts.
This is enough information to create a shadowmap for the inserted terrain, and automaticall save this shadowmap as skin on the terrain (make a copy of it)
This way the shadowed terrain is fast and looks quite good, and is easy to implement for users. Just insert a terrain into a level, assign it as shodowterrain and let a renderfunction create its shadowmap.
There is no need to have a dynamic terrainshadow, If one still used static BSP Blocks.
Either all dynamic Models and then dynamic shadow with a shader, or Using Blocks, and having static shadows then for the terrain too.
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Re: soft shadows?
[Re: nkl]
#94934
10/23/06 13:07
10/23/06 13:07
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Joined: Jun 2005
Posts: 4,875
broozar
Expert
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Expert
Joined: Jun 2005
Posts: 4,875
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Quote:
Quote:
if someone could just transper this code to 3dgs... http://download.developer.nvidia.com/dev...LSL_SoftShadows .. is it possible at all?
Hi DaBro0zar! You can use the A6 VC++ Plugin SDK to write a VC++ wrapper to use nv build-in hardware shadow function.
sorry, but i have no clue how to do that. can you? what would it cost? you'd get customers like sand on the shore with that...
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