I posted in the engine forum here, but no one knows why the shadows disappear when
the camera goes below certain angles. And others indicated having the same
problem. It seems to happen mostly when the camera is about the same height or
slightly lower than the model projecting the shadow.

Here is a example with a cube casting a stencil shadow on a plane that disappears as the camera tilts upward;

And here is the file file

Thanks!

yes, please fix this for 6.4!

it's really a shame that a6 doesn't have useable dynamic shadows (the old ones are only acceptable on flat ground and the new ones only for diablo-style isometric games where the camera always stays above everything)!

Yes, the baddest thing at the engine are the shadows, the defaults look bad, and the stencils badder. I cannot understand why, for example the sphere engine has better shadows, then a engine which is made by a lot of people.

Please Conitec give us better shadows or fix the bugs with the stencils!

Stencil shadows are not rendered when the camera is in such a position that non-stencil shadows would not be visible either. This will be fixed, but not yet for 6.4, as there are some other engine modifications required before.

And what is with the lines between the model and the shadow? Will this be also fixed? I hope, then without these shadows my project looks not very good.

Thanks JLC, this is very bad news, but at least I and others having this
problem know. In my chase cam and spectator cam, the stencil shadow on my
terrain blinks on and off. So I will have to do without a terrain shadow for
the aircraft. It looks very bad.

I am not sure why this was moved from the bug hunt section, as others
experincing this problem will surely look there to see if this has been
reported and likely report it again.

A6 seems to have some critical issues with lighting and shadows, I feel these
problems are severely hurting it as it competes with other engines. C lite is
nice, but lighting and shadows are basic essentials far more important. I hope
the resolution of these issues will precede development of any new features.

Hi Kohji, I think I read somewhere that those lines are caused by a model which
is not a fully closed mesh. You can test your mesh to see if it is closed in
Med.

Yes the problem with shadows disappearing is the most annoying problem that I have with 3dgs. Hope the fix will make it to A6.4

@ Matt_Aufderheide: I doesn't meaned that I don't understand why this works, more why it isn't possible to have a technique like this in gs. And this technique couldn't be ever active, just with activation like this:
Code:

---

shadow_soft = on;

---

so the developers can use this for games, which are designed for high-end systems.
Oh before I forgot, yesterday I played a game which uses the Unreal1 Engine, and in this game the shadows look better then in a6.

The Torque Engine has soft shadows even without any shaders and it works on DirectX and OpenGL.

So it should be possible. I tested their demo and was deeply impressed (very huge terrains and very productive real time editing tools).