I start to get mad with the light and shadow stuff.

None of my meshes accept any light, they don't cast shadow, they don't receive shadow. MDL7 files by the way. Why? There is nothing mentioned in the manual that Meshes cannot cast and receive shadow. But they don't work.

Anyways, so i have reimportet my working (it shows and behaves correct, there was just no shadow) MDL7 landscape mesh into MED, then exported it as FBX, then reimportet into WED. Now the shadowmap stuff started at least to compile. Up to this point:



A mesh with 1000 tris gets blown up to over 64k faces? What the heck is 3DGS doing with my mesh?

So 3DGS can just handle 64000 tris?

And the mainquestion. Is there a working light and shadow solution in 3DGS? I cannot get anything to work here.

Hi Tiles, there is a simple answer to all your problems: Learn working with a 3D engine, by reading the manual!

First you need to read about that there are different types of entities in the entities chapter. All types have special purposes. For shadows you need level geometry, for terrain you need a terrain entity.

http://manual.conitec.net/wed_entities.htm

And when you get an error you should read in the manual what it means.

http://manual.conitec.net/engineerrors.htm

A mesh of > 64K faces is insanely big, and even if it could be rendered by your 3D card, it would be very slow. Most 3D cards can't render such a mesh size, and no commercial 3D game would use such big meshes, therefore I assume 3DGS forbids you to create such meshes right away. Do not import big terrain as level geometry, rather import it as a terrain entity.

Hope this helps you to soon create levels like a pro!

Thanks Petra

Manual is not my only source though. Sometimes better to ask at the forum because it makes some things clearer

When a Mesh cannot cast nor receive shadows, what is the cast and receive shadow checkbox good for then?

Hi Tiles, this checkbox is for dynamic shadows. The shadows cast by static lightsources WED are static shadows.

Now things starts to make sense. Many thanks

Back to my initial question. What the heck is 3DGS doing with my mesh? It has 973 vertices and around 2000 tris. But 3DGS refuses to accept it when light comes in calculation. With meshes not at all. And as Map neither.

I have imported it as FBX, one time the working MDL7 from MED (that one gave me the Bad Meshsize error), another time the original FBX file. Then i started to compile just this mesh. It is still at compiling the original file, at generating lightmaps for around 25000 shadows (2000 tris with 25000 shadows?). And will surely give me again the Bad Meshsize warning.



What is going on here?

I think i got it. It's the mesh size. But not the face count. It's the mesh size in units. Seems that i hit a limit here.

It compiles fine with a scale of 1 (has around a size of 90x90x9 then). But fails as described with a scale of 100 (has around a size of 9000x9000x900 then).

Hmm, but i need it this big. That's not fair

Map compilers split surfaces into smaller parts when they exceed a certain size, this is called tesselation. Its needed for dynamic lights. This is why your terrain suddenly gets more vertices when its over a certain size.

In the map compiler popup panel you can set the tesselation limit to a higher value. This should solve that problem.

Ah, there it is

Many thanks, this solves the problem

EDIT: ... and doesn't play together with the multitexture terrainshader. Graphics is something to get mad at in the 3D Gamestudio. But at least now the shadow works ^^

you dont need a world THAT big. Start with a smaller project and then go up doing something as big as that.

Alternatively, just make the relative sizes different. The terrain at size 1, and the player at size 0.01, should come out at about the same as if the terrain was a scale of 100.