Yeah well at this point the best thing to do is just use every single shade-c feature which involves also terrains.
Today after all the shadows issue casted on a block plane I realized "hey .. i'm not gonna have a flat ground everywhere, i need terrain to make it look bumpy and smooth"
So of course I tried a terrain multi-texturing shader and guess what, no pre-rendered shadow was affecting that hmp with multitexture, of course.
How do I begin and end a sentence with the same word, I got skills? - quote: Chasing Amy
So I realized all these solutions and tricks in the end are not tricks. I was still far away from a solution.
The only one is just use shade-c terrain technology which is an mdl as well with holding the shadow map in alpha channel.
So... everything has to be done fake.
My only regret is I'm using an engine with certain expectations:
1. convex blocks/concave meshes were meant to be for architecture, but if i add a normal map.. framerate dies.
2. hmps were meant to be terrains, but if i add a multitexturing shader I lose the static shadows casted on them.
3. mdls don't cast pre-rendered shadows, so either i have to create lods and assign the crappiest lod's shadow, or have them casted in within a very small range.
Anyway mdls mdls mdls.. I have to do everything with mdls, and I have to FAKE everything in within that certain mdl.
And above all this is far from being a pleasant development, the whole procedure is extremely slow.
Don't think about it as a complain, Think about it as a summary after spending some cash on this engine.
It's not a bad engine in the end, but it's definitely un-finished and personally I wasn't expecting that after all this time since A4.
Last edited by PietroNifosi; 12/23/09 13:26.