As JCL said, the current shadow system is running on the cpu, thats why it´s extrem slow; But he will fix that, sometimes.. maybe... if he gets bored

Exactly, if he is bored. And I think this is first thing we need with this engine, better SHADOW system.
So please Jcl make this thing better for us.
Current shadow system forces me to loose 2-3 more time that I need if shadows are good, then I dont need to find sollution in another programs to fake them like in this screen:

That is a realy time consuming for nothing

@DEX: My last post was related to dynamic shadows and not terrain static shadows. I don't use terrain, so it doesn't matter to me at this point. However, a lot of people do, and it is a highly requested feature that needs to be addressed if it already hasn't.

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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.

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I'm all for advancements, however multiple shadows don't make or break a game or engine, nor is it any less realistic the way it is now and has been in almost every other engine for years. There are still plenty of games coming out that use both static lightmaps and an oval blob shadow for the player's shadow. And, they sell pretty well, too. We're not all trying to make the next Crysis or FEAR. Last time I checked it was bad gameplay vs. good gameplay that people remember and games in the good category live on no matter what they look like.

Please look at the current games and even at render pictures. You will notice very fast: Realism does not come mainly from polygons or textures. It comes in the most cases from lighting. Lights and shadows are the key.

Take a good scene an analyze what you see. I do that very often since I do texture creating at the moment. The same texture looks dull, non-metallic and flat without lighting. Now comes the light, a normal map, a specular map and even a depth map - the texture begins to look realistic and it starts to reflect light in certain spots.

With added shadows the scene becomes almost real.

This little story just tells you that real artists especially need one tool: lights and shadows to make professional scenes. So I understand DEX very much. This is the part what makes the artwork impressive. No matter how many good scripting functions are in the engine.

What does that mean for A6/A7? We need for future updates static and dynamic lights in combination with shaders (normal and parallax mapping with specular highlights). I am very happy that Conitec is going this way now. They want to provide shaders in a template and they want to improve the scene management to use shaders on top of level geometry. So it could become what I have in mind.

But DEX is still missing shadows on terrain. Did you ever create a terrain with shadows? I did. It is a big amount of work. When you use the template shader then you have to paint the shadows or you have to generate them in another tool like Freeworld3D, Gile(s) or in your rendering application. After that you import all in WED. You do not see the tiled textures and you have to place models almost blind.

Did you ever check IceX2 (a tool from a forum user). This one shows how it can be done. It is a terrain in-game editor that places objects, paints terrain and calculates shadows for the hills (but unfortunately not for level or model geometry).

At the end you got my vote for the best lighting and shadow system available

Regards,
Frank

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Last time I checked it was bad gameplay vs. good gameplay that people remember and games in the good category live on no matter what they look like.

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This is an irrellevant statement. No one said anything about gameplay. We were talking about the A6 shadows, and why they need improvement.

You can design your game however you want, whats that got to do the the shadowing system?

Our policy was so far that all A6 main features should be able run on 1.1/1.3 hardware. This required so far that shadows run on the CPU. Users with not-so-new hardware are grateful for that.

As mentioned, a shadow mapping template is now planned, and I don't even need to get bored for writing it - on the contrary, this would be fun. However I'm having some more issues on my task list at the moment. Shadows are important, but other things are important too. We've recently hired a new programmer - Alexej - and are looking for another one, but I guess I won't have time for the shadow template within the next two months.

I hope this answers your questions.

The easyest thing would be to make a shadowbaker
within WED, that accounts for BSP Blocks and (chosen) models,
and also take the lightinformation from the levelligts.

This is enough information to create a shadowmap for the inserted
terrain, and automaticall save this shadowmap as skin
on the terrain (make a copy of it)

This way the shadowed terrain is fast and looks quite good,
and is easy to implement for users.
Just insert a terrain into a level, assign it as shodowterrain and
let a renderfunction create its shadowmap.

There is no need to have a dynamic terrainshadow, If
one still used static BSP Blocks.

Either all dynamic Models and then dynamic shadow with a shader,
or Using Blocks, and having static shadows then for the terrain too.