i am curious about the soft shadows which are mentioned in the shader template forecast...

i suppose the soft shadows will be depth map shadows?

how cumbersome will they be to use?

probably there will be the need for assigning a shadow receiver material to every object which should receive soft shadows?

will there be the need to manually define views which render a depth map for lights which should cast soft shadows?

Ehem you look clever!!
And said me have can make that when player shadow can get longer and shorter when you wolk close to light or go away!! And when ligh not shadow dissapears!!

Yes, depth map shadows. It will be a template and not an engine feature, so don't worry about how complicated they are to use - it will be as easy as usual with the templates. We'll use the standard materials, so you only need to assign something to the senders, not to the receivers.

SHADOWS are the weekest point of 3dgs, so I am happy to hear any improvements in that area.
Also I am curious when we will have shadows on terain, from blocks, that should be first feature to implement if you ask me. And terain self shadow map? (it can be faked through shader)
Why is so complicate thing to make good shadow system for terrains and models?

I think you should write that in Forecast on very very first place and start to work on that TODAY. Because even if we get some big publisher to see our game, first thing he will notice is a really bad shadow system and game will be rejected 100%. Belive me, I published more than 30 games in 7 diff. languages, so I am pretty "at home" in that area.
Now what we can do with shadows on terain is to fake them, thats all. And very time consuming.

So please make descent shadow system on terrain and from models and we will be happy and maybe some of us will make AAA title.
Thanks

I can't belive that users are sutisfied with current shadow system!
Please lets say something about that and maybe we will get new shadow system very soon

There's nothing wrong with the current system. There are standard stencil shadows and the non-stencil kind. A new kind of stencil shadow was recently implemented that eliminates some of the errors with the older style, however at the cost of speed. Most modern or semi-modern engines have one or the other or both and most games(including AAA) have used these kinds of shadows in the past and continue to today. The other engines' versions aren't any different from these unless they're a style that 3DGS doesn't support.

Soft shadows are achieved via shaders and you can either buy the Sphere plugin now or wait until they are implemented in the template shaders collection(see Forecast).

Terrain does not receive any shadow from blocks... If this is good for you OK, but I need something more. You can only fake shadows with terrain pass.

if someone could just transper this code to 3dgs... http://download.developer.nvidia.com/dev...LSL_SoftShadows .. is it possible at all?

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There's nothing wrong with the current system

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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.

hey matt, you as a shader expert, what do you think about the NV-Code (url above)? it offers hard shadows, soft shadows in 2.0 and 3.0, a sample slider etc. to make the shadows fast and good-looking at any system at the same time. as i understand much too few of the topic, any chance for it?