Has anyone got this to work well? When I try to use the code, it shades the entire terrain! I am using an all white(255,255,255) 24 bit tga as the second texture on the hmp. Anyone have any luck with this?
Thanks for any ideas!

don't use a skybox when calculating the shadowmap, because it will shadow the whole terrain.

Thanks Christoph, and I am just using an empty scene with a hmp in it, no sky box or anything to get in the way of the trace. Puzzling!

Ok, I got it working! It seems that c_trace was returning the length of the trace instead of a 0 even when nothing is hit! I used all the flags, Is this a known problem, or maybe I am not doing something correctly?

What I am doing as a work-around, is comparing the trace length to the distance of the target pixel, and then shading the pixel if the trace is shorter.

undocumented feature. download the new beta manual. trace_hit returns 1 if target is hit.

Seems like you got it, But I know Dennis_Fantasy has done this successfully for me so if you have any more questions, he'd be my first suggestion. But then, I don't know EVERYBODY who's done it, he's the only one I know in this case.

Jason

Thanks Jason!

A big problem I was having was that the script uses the terrains bounding box and origin to get its size and XY center. If the origin is off, it gets messed up. I fixed this by changing the function to use the terrains corner vertices instead.

Also the script is made for HMP's and not MDL's such as I neeeded, so I hade to remove "ignore_models" a c_trace function was using .

An interesting note for anyone else using this script, The uv mapping has to
be in the correct orientation. It was drawing the shadows in the wrong places for me until I rotated the mapping 90 degress CCW in MED

I got more realistic shadows (IMO), by keeping the "suns" position at the same relative position (offset) to each pixel checked rather than all the traces coming from the same point. This probably looks better because the real sun is so far away it seems to cast somewhat parallel shadows.

I added the wiki "TGA write" script to this too, it works great! Load the terrain, press enter and out comes the tga shadow map! (well, almost that easy! ).