@Exciter

The point is we are asking for A7 to allow pre-calculated static soft shadows AND dynamic soft-shadows too, then you as the developer use those techniques seperately or combined as best suits your game or particular scene. FarCry and Gears of war are good examples of this, they do not just use one technique.

As far as the Crytek engine example you are talking about, I think it's pretty clear that this engine has been developed with the intention to alter the environment and lighting dynamically in mind. I.e. knock down trees, destroy buildings, have burst of light from explosions, swinging lamps etc. etc. In both cases the lighting and shadows need to change dynamically, so obviously static shadows would look wrong. Having said that, the engine definitely allows static lighting as well, so this is just a creative choice in the example you picked out. i.e. Their creative decision in this case is having dynamic environment damage and day to night cycles etc. compensates adequately for the dynamic shadows required not looking quite as good as pre-calculated ones.

Crytek is crytek, but it strikes me that if there is a capable soft shadow solution as 3rd party software, wouldn't decals or vertex weights make more sense because these kinds of things can't be addresssed by the community?

as 90% of the users are using 3rd party modelling and animation tools, exporting their anims as vertex animations, there's rarely someone who would profit from it. a general visual enhancement would benefit us all.

@Slacker

I see your point, but in the end as we really need ALL of these features, maybe a better way to decide the best priority is to think about how each of these affects development.

I would say we need the lighting/shadows first, as you generally need to develop the look of your game through several iterations over time. Also if you want to make a demo to raise funding or attract team members, the look of your graphics is going to be very important, so again lighting/shadows is key to have early.

It's not fair to say there is an off-the-shelf method for soft-shadows if you are referring to Sphere as I pointed out previously it's unfortunately not suitable in a lot situations.

Animation in contrast can be fully created in Max or Blender etc. and just exported as vertex anims or bones without weighting, until weighted anims becomes supported. Same for decals, they are perfectly workable as is until a better system arrives. In short it's going to be much easier to have your art style/lighting finalised from early on and then updating animation and decals later on. Trying to do the reverse will be problematic.

"A Map renderer for using a view as a map or radar screen, Scaling Truetype and Bitmap Fonts. Font installer for Truetype fonts. Size prediction for Truetype TEXTs. Proportional Bitmap fonts. Speed-Up of Truetype text drawing by preloading font textures. "

These are actually quite important for those looking for a good menu/hud system in their games, trust me when I say it will make things much easier, it's not flashy but it's backend stuff.

Vertex weighting is important if you plan to have the characters programmed, I've done a fair amount of bone programming for weapons, which are not organic so they don't need the weighting. However, characters, whether you want their heads to turn to enemies, arms pointing at enemies, feet bending on the ground, ect. vertex weighting is important, and in the end, just makes things easier too.

Shadows and lighting are also very important, stencil shadows don't work in my game as none of my mesh's are closed(I like to optimize models/worlds). Old school 2d shadows are my only option right now, as Sphere, if I remember right, requires your entire worlds to be normal mapped and set within the engine, also very slow(for my project type) in a large outdoor scene. So far the plans are to use FBX import and lightmap levels, and use 2d shadows for the main dynamic objects. Optional(so user can switch on/off depending on computer) softshadows for these dynamic objects would make me very happy.

You can´t do with vertex animations what you can do with bones. Almost every game uses nowadays bones animation because the games are more and more interactive. That are improvements.

[red/]You can import and export bones models with ms3d and fragmotion, so there is no reason why anyone shouldn´t use bones animation. [red]

"It's not fair..." You are talking about workarounds which reduce the quality drastically/don´t work, while there is a tool which produces soft shadows as well as you can draw shadows on the texture. With the dds format the texture is tiny. Anyway, thanks for trying, but these arguments didn´t satisfied me very much

I animate in max, and export mesh animation because I want good joint deformation - this works good, but file sizes get huge if you have many frames, and you don't have the flexibility to program in movements. This as well as decals have been standard in games for some time, no?

I place sprites for blood spray, and ornimental graphics, so a decal system would be great.

As far as soft shadows - I am not sure what Sphere doesn't do well, I have adapted my own shaders from forum posts - nor am I 100% on what a conitec solution to soft shadows would be.

I feel Conitec should address some of the issues that have become standard in other games - they are standard in other games for a reason. Gloss is great, but gloss is gloss.

And there is much eye candy to be had with shaders right now.

One last thing on this - who wants more textures? There is tons of great textures to be had on the net:

image after

is one of thousand free texture sites. Besides art development is a huge part of game design - stock textures will get you... well a stock game.

Vertex and weight
decals

The following is an example of why vertex weights are important to have good looking animations
the third deformation is what we have now the first is the ideal
WE NEED THIS!

that animation looks ugly in either case. i don't understand what that has to do with vertex weighting? you can achieve that without vw, can't you?