I will repeat myself: Shadows and lighting are most important in order to sell game. I alreayd explained. You can make good game but when publisher sees poor shadow on terain you are doomed, and game is rejeted, I am sure about that.
So, JCL please rewrite your TODO list and place shadows on first place. We really have descent engine now, and it is a really pitty that shadows on terrain are so bad, practically non existent.
I ask you again to write exactly what and when you will do that we get shadows on terain, or some shadow baker like Democles said
Thank you

Static shadows and dynamic shadows are completely different things. Terrain shadows are of course possible with any hardware, and have nothing to do with the shader templates. They are on our high priority list as you can see in the forecast page. A terrain shadow generator will be developed for the Map compiler as soon as the current task with the map compiler is finished.

I cannot find anything about terrain shadows on the forecast page..?!

Quote:

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Terrain shadows are of course possible with any hardware, and have nothing to do with the shader templates.

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Hm I didnt noticed that when I put block on terrain I am getting shadow from it onto terrain, or maybe i cant do it??
Also I am getting very bad shadows when I place model on a slope, shadow is simply not adjusted to the slope of the terrain.
So terain shadows ARE possible but they are useles in this state. And I absolutely agree with Matt that a lots of people is urging for good shadows.
So I highly support your statement that we will soon get shadows on terrain, and urge you once again to speed up things in that area because I feel that this issue is essential to make quality games with 3dgs. Even if engine is slow we could always play with nexus and get better loading times and FPS but with shadows there ar simply no options. Or we have 2 options: first is to fake them with shadow map in shaders, and second is not to use model shadows at all on terrains. But what if I want to place house block on terrain? How can I get shadows then without faking it?

If a shadowmapper will be included that is good.

I dont think that a baked shadow is "faked",
as the lighning on blocks would be "faked" in this sense too,

it is just the application of the same concept of creating static shadows
to the terrain, as it is to the BSP-blocks.

But how will the calculated shadowmap be stored?
In the terrain directly, by altering the skin (and making a copy of
the terrain with the new skin?)
Or as a seperate created skintexture, that can be applied to the terrain manually?
(To rework certain areas, like adding shadow/light jitter for leaves of trees,
and some fixes for the shadow)

Will the shadowmapper account for models too, or just the Blocks?

There should be a specific multitextureshader for the shadowed terrain too,
it works with the MT-shader from the templates,
but maybe a special shader, that keeps the terrain to
have the exact lighning from
the ambient light brighnes of the BSP Level as a minnimum, to
the sunlight Brightness as a Maximum.
So that the shadows will have the ambient light brighness, and
the sunny parts, that sunlightbrigness.

I would prefer a special single shadowmap. That can be used for overaying another texture or for a shader (e.g. the blue channel in the template shader).

The method can even fully support the template terrain shader and bake the shadow directly into the blue channel of the bitmap. We can still extract that channel with "The GIMP" or "Photoshop".

Regards,
Frank

There should be the option to save the shadowmap
onto the terrainskin (blue channel)
and manually to a file.

Currently the skintextures can only be extracted as 16Bit Texture
from the skins in MED, so
maby one needs a 24Bit TGA for editing.

In my view static shadow maps of all kinds need to be gotten rid of completely.