Thanks for the bug reports!

As there seem to be a lot of problems with the shadows, i changed some things (old shadows are still included, this is a new sType):
- Shadowmap gets encoded to a A8R8G8B8 (32bit argb) texture instead of a R32F (32bit floating point) texture. This runs on virtually any GFX Card and is also a little faster.
- Because of the encoding, Variance Shadowmapping can no longer be used, so i added a 3x3 PCF filtering instead. This doesn't look as good a vsm, but it's still nice and also runs on a lot of older hardware (should run on a GeforceFX and Radeon 9000, not tested though).

Here's what i still have to do (for performance optimizations and easier handling):
- Rewrite the global depthmap shader to encode it's map to a A8R8G8B8 texture
- Use that depthmap to draw full scene shadows (sType = 1) instead of rendering the full scene shadows in an additional pass. Will fasten things up a bit and shadows are drawn by deferred shading and not forward rendering. Might be useable for other things as well like ssao.
- Think of a way to get correct lighting when using scene shadows. This won't be perfect, but better than the current way how full scene shadows are added to the scene.

I will release a new snapshot next week so you guys can test the new shadows and see if they work or if you still get bugs.
If they do work, i will think about adding parallel split shadow mapping for better visuals. This will be another sType, so in the end you guys can choose exactly which shadows you want. Fast PCF filtered shadows which will run on a broad range of hardware, parallel split shadows with PCF which will be slower but nicer, variance shadows which will not run on all hardware, parallel split variance shadows which will (hopefully) look superb but will only make sense on high end GPUs.




If you use sType = 0, you can increase the brightness with ambient_red/green/blue.
If you are using sType = 1, you can increase brightness by opening sc_vsmSun.fx in shade-c/fx and changing shadowAlpha. I forgot to include a simple method to change brightness through lite-c. Will include it in the next snapshot






Shadows are parallel projected and then use vsm. As you already said, there is nothing more to it



At the moment you have to use sType = 1 to get shadows on gs-shaders. I'm working on it.



Good rays are indeed blurred a bit, so the shader doesn't have to use that many tabs and it will run on a broader range of hardware. As for the godrays only beeing displayed when looking into the sun: I don't know a method on how to do good looking godrays when not having the sun on screen. As soon as i find a fast solution for this, i will include it



Yes, this is a known bug. I can't do anything about it.



You have to call sc_setup() again after changing the resolution. The DirectX device beeing dead after a few seconds sounds like you are calling sc_setup(), sc_smSunSetup(), sc_lightBeams() every frame in a while loop, which you shouldn't do. Do the examples work for you or do they also crash after a while?


Again, thanks for the feedback and sorry for all the bugs (especially the blocky shadows on some systems)