letting objects throw a shadow that moves and scales according to it's light source and its properties whithout falling through level geometry should not exhaust the engine, if a real and usable dynamic lighting won't make the way into a7, i'll honestly be off like frank.

i cannot comprehend sentences like "3DGS has a fine shadow system". either you were never in need of usable dynamic shadows or never tried to enhance gs graphics with shaders. and obviously you never tried to build large outdoor areas.

at last partly i must agree to that statement, broozar. i don't see why there shouldn't be efforts taken in that direction, but there's not even a mention on the forecast page.

Absolutely agree with Dex. I know this "work-flow". And even when you have baked your shadows in Freeworld then you get plenty of problems while placing your objects in WED. Since you do not have a real-time preview you can only guess the right positions for your objects to fit the baked shadows. So you have to test and move every object. That is no fun at all.

In terms of terrain editing we are way behind Torque, Lawmaker and other solutions. But we have to finish our projects. We invested lots of time and money. So there is no alternative to 3dgs currently.

Orange Brat:
Shader games do not have to be shiny nor plastic. You can control the amount of specularity for every pixel of your texture with a specularity map in an alpha-channel in modern shaders. You really should check how modern games work.

The 3D illusion is created with the interplay of light and shadow. I feel these
are the things 3DGS most need to improve in its rendering to create games with
a modern looking visual effect.

Vertex diffuse shaders make good shadowing on models, but fast realtime
softshadows for all entity types that can be cast to all other entity types
is sorely needed. I can't think of something that is more important for the
future of the engine IMO, and I can't imagine A7 being viable for many users
without including a serious effort in improving shadows in this manner.

Broozar, Frank, Dex: It seems I'm on your side
Honestly, if A7 still has nothing that could call itself a modern lighting/shadowing system, I'll certainly jump off the 3DGS train at once. The same applies for me finding out that my static meshes are to be build into meshes by the compiler in a day's work - building meshes out of meshes seems to be Conitec logics.

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The same applies for me finding out that my static meshes are to be build into meshes by the compiler in a day's work - building meshes out of meshes seems to be Conitec logics.

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I agree, this(tesselation) needs to be completely customizable. When people make their levels optimized they don't always want the compiler splitting things up and adding just for better lighting. I'm guessing Conitec will change this once A7 is actually released; otherwise it wouldn't make much sense... especially for those who don't need light mapping.

William:
If I understood this right then the reason for the tesselation is to improve the results of the dynamic lighting, especially the Gamestudio kind of vertex lighting.

And so you are absolutely right. From my mind it sounds like a waste of time to do that in a modern engine since vertex lighting is old and should be replaced by pixel lighting. And tesselation is not needed for pixel lighting. You need only a good texture resolution for that.

A7 should become a modern engine if you ask me.

@JCL:
Sorry, the discussion distracts from the original question of DEX. I am really interested in this as well. Dex wrote:

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Do you plan to add smooth shadows from models to terrains without need for shader 2.0?

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Thank you in advance.