Indeed, a better multiplayer part wouldn't hurt

p.s I just saw my SED publish request was implemented, great

You can have bloom easily since one and a half year, throught sylex3. It´s very easy to implement the build in things. And with a 'litte' dx programming, you can have all you want, just look at sphere.

Ok, from my point of view everything can be implemented, I know, but that would need time, and most of us have a litte time for there hobby.

Ed: I just reread your post, orange. Yes, you are right, a ready-to-go solution wouldn't hurt, even more when this solution is aviable through open source.

Damn, found this so late... In the last days I am finding a lot of stuff very late :/ Strange.

Anyway, I don´t understand that softshadow thing too. It´s nice to have soft shadows, but I think they can only be used rarely because they won´t be very fast and need a good computer to run on.

And too bad I could only vote for one. Otherwise I would have voted for decals AND vertex weights. And I think many would have done that.
Because now it's not like, if all the people who wanted decals or vertex weights (for example clones of me ) would have voted for the one with higher votes. I mean if I have only one vote and I see that vertex weights is almost leading, and decals have no chance, then I would give my vote vertex weights instead of decals to make at least my other favourite leading.

I mean then wouldn´t it be 50 votes decals, and 50 votes vertex weights and 51 votes soft shadows. It would be 100 votes vertex weigths and 0 votes decals and 51 votes soft shadows. Ok, that´s the extremest possible case. And this example shows that this way of voting would make decals look unwanted, but that isn´t intended by the voters. THat´s why I like polls where I can vote for everything I like/dislike.

Last but not least a nice idea, to make a poll. I like it.

Yep, that´s also a point why I don´t understand the urgent need of softshadow. I realy don´t understand it.

I don´t totally know how soft shadows could win.

Well, softshadows are visually nice, but as far as I can they run pretty slow.
I mean the shadows right now are slow and they have no smoothing. When they now get smoothed they will logically run even slower. I mean most users playing my games are complaining that the shadows are slow so I guess most people turn them off.
And now for some reason I totally can not understand why users voted for softshadows. Stencil shadows are a nice gimmick, but nothing I would build on... Can someone of the people who voted for softshadows why she/he has voted for softshadows, with the knowlegde in the background that the stencil shadows are slow and difficult to use because of the camera issue with the shadow volume.

EDIT: Same for the terrain thing. ISn´t there already a multi terrain shader thing? And there is a simple and well working application which renders static shadows on a terrain. Of course colored shadows would be nice. But it´s very useful as it is now. I think most people just don´t know that tool.

I think that lighting and shadows make the most important point for creating visual worlds. Without light and shadow it looks flat and can only create cartoon worlds.

Softshadows can be rendered on the graphics card and therefore don't have to be slow with the right technique. Besides that they probably don't have the problems with clipping errors when within the camera volume.

With the fact in mind that current stencil shadows are quite useless with those problems I would say: softshadows (or any other new shadow technique) is our only hope to get realistic worlds.

We need shadows reacting to dynamic lights (maybe even optional more than one light) in indoors or to sunlight (outdoors). They should be casted correct. The current perspective is wrong (probably because it comes from the very distant sun).

So I really think this is a very very important point when you want to create 3d-worlds. Otherwise you can paint a 2d-background and make an adventure game.

We need good soft-shadows and lighting(and wieghted vertex animation) to be able do more realistic looking worlds and characters, so the engine and our games look up-to-date visually.

Like it or not our customers' visual expectations are driven forward by the big commercial games. Farcry was 3 years ago now and pretty much all other indie engines offer soft-shadows already or are implementing them soon, 3DGS needs to keep up with the market.

Soft-shadows are a different technique from stencils and do not have the camera volume problems. Links to several papers describing methods to do soft-shadows with good performance were already posted on here, including a patented technique that can be licensed very cheaply, so it is wrong to assume soft-shadows must be slow or poor.

Sphere 2.0 has very nice soft shadows, but doesn't suit all projects as you lose out on the perfomance gains from A6/A7's native culling methods, the option to have pre-calculated light mapping as well in your scenes and you also lose the other light management features added for A7.

Having pre-calculated light mapping will remain important for visual quality and performance, especially on lower end hardware but even at the high-end too, take a look at Gears of War.

The shadow Rendering on terrain should be part of WED, as the Light/shadow Rendering on blocks
is at the moment. This is totally the same concept: Create static lightning onto
the unmovable Structures of your level. The terrain could get a flag in WED: "light rendering"
and WED alters the skin of the terrain and applies the shadowmap onto it, reqacting on
the sun and Lightsources of the level.

This is a "soft shadow" then, but baked onto the terrain.

Allright. THanks for clearing that up.

I don´t want to make anything bad. I also think that soft shadows for dynamic model rendering are a good thing.

But here is why I am so afraid of dynamic shadows. This is a demo of crytek, I think one of the best real time render engines, and I also think it has the best dynamic shadows. The point is they look awful compared to static shadows because they are flat. There are no light in the shadow. I mean a real shadow is created by much light which gets reflected by all "walls". It doesn´t matter if it´s sunlight or if it´s a lamp. A shadow has almost never the same color in itself. Well, maybe even never. I mean the reflected light will reach the shadow somewhere more somewhere less.

That´s why I think soft dynamic shadows are no advantage for static models. Anyway, here is the link to the movie which made me think dynamic shadows are bad for enviroment:
http://www.gametrailers.com/umwatcher.php?id=44386

http://www.gametrailers.com/umwatcher.php?id=44370

I have seen good dynamic shadows in Severance for example. But as far as I remember they used dynamic shadows only for characters and items. But for enviroment static shadows look better as far as I can see. By static shadows I mean also textures drawn by hand inclusive shading.