Hi guys,

i would like to ask you a question and i would also apreciate any comment on this by Conitec.

Most of my entities use dynamic shadows (.shadow = on). Unfortunately i found out that i wanted my shadows not to be transparent (otherwise i get sorting errors over other transparent sprites - dirt patches on ground etc.). Because (according to a reply from conitec) there is no way at this time to disable shadow transparency I thought i would make my own shadows in the same way they're created by the shadow flag (the entity made flat and unlit) but not transparent. Trying that i came across some interesting issues.

As I wrote above (if get it right) the shadows are in fact copied entites. Knowing that i was wondering - do these "shadow entities" eat up the same amount of system resources as the original entity (i guess that their texture is shared) ?

I'm asking this because i found out, that when i have two of my characters in an active camera view (they're about 1000 & 2000 polys) and i turn one's shadow off, i get about 4 fps increase on a slower machines (800 Mhz or so) which makes nearly 10 fps for both of them . Now that isn't much and the machines are much stronger than that nowadays (although i think that A5 due to it's BSP and other features - ?unlike A6? - is intended to perform well exactly on such machines) but what if there were 10 such entities instead of 2 even on a stronger PC? Wouldn't get say 20 FPS or more "wasted" just on calculating the shadows?

So am I right in thinking that these fake shadows take up almost the same amount of system power as the original entity does?

If it is so (hope it isn't though), it would only seem logical for the shadow to be created from a low (as low as you can get poly proxy instead...

Can any of you guys (or Conitec) confirm this?

Thanks for reading it so far and not complaining about my english ;-)

T.