Topic: D2X-XL shadowing improved

[karx-elf-erx]

The last week has seen me dig into shadow mapping, and I have mastered the basics of it, but the further I got the more I had to realize how deep that rabbit hole really is, and how mathematical it gets to produce high quality shadows with shadow mapping.

So I took a few good ideas I had from that over to the current shadowing system (volume stencil shadows), improving these.

The first improvement is that when glow effects are enabled,  instead of the annoyingly hard shadows soft ones will be produced which looks waaaaay better.

The other improvement is to have only bright dynamic (moving) light sources cast shadows (i.e. weapon fire, explosions, headlights). That makes for a very dynamic and interactive shadowing which imo looks both better and makes more sense than the previous method of picking the brightest and closest static lights for shadow casting. You now have a visible correspondence between shadows and light sources casting them, making the system much more plausible.

Please don't ask me to mask shadows off light emitting faces though.

[Foil]

Nice! I'll have to check this out.

...the previous method of picking the brightest and closest static lights for shadow casting.

Yeah, that method seemed odd when the closest/brightest shadow-source would change, suddently moving the shadow to a different place.  Sounds like this new method should be much better, and more dynamic!

[VANGUARD]

looks nice 

I hope to get the Descent games rolling soon. I miss those games. my biggest game series has been Call of Duty and Descent.

[Scyphi]

I still need to get Descent and the such on my new laptop...

[Jeremy.west]

looks nice 

I hope to get the Descent games rolling soon. I miss those games. my biggest game series has been Call of Duty and Descent.

me too. call of Duty is type of addiction. hope descent will too