i thought projected shadows were the way to go for this. stencil shadows aren't a huge issue in terms of speed, but they are as sharp as shadows get. you'll need projected shadows (which half-life2 uses, im pretty sure), but they'll probably be slow on level geometry. i'm no shader guru however, and i'm sure there would be some way for conitec to give a6 some native support that won't suffer as much from the shortcomings of mixing level blocks and shaders.

my thoughts that hl2's shadows are projected are based on the fact that if the model's bounding box gets too close to a wall the edges of the shadow bend up to a point closer to the light source than the actual model (implying that the shadows are projected from another position) and that the shadows are quite pixelated if you look carefully. please correct me if i'm wrong.

any thoughts, conitec?

JulzMighty