XR Shadows

[biggeruniverse]

As of yesterday, I have started working on shadows again. After the RC3 release, shadows will be integrated into the testing version, and will become part of the 1.0 release.

EDIT: for a little more detail, instead of the Uniform Shadow Maps in the screenshots, I'm implementing Light-Space Perspective Shadow Maps, which basically increase shadow detail near the viewer.

[biggeruniverse]

http://img10.imageshack.us/img10/9329/shot00004sd.png

Yes, they are still being worked on. The code is integrated in test client now for further testing. It's not very refined, but it works.

[Mohican]

Nice progress Big!
Some blending for softer contours next? 

[Congress]

Heres the real question: since good mappers paint all their shadows manually now, after this is hopefully implemented will the area under trees be super dark? That is, dynamic shadows + editor painting = total darkness?

Regardless, looks good. And i was in that game. 

[biggeruniverse]

The answer is no, it wouldn't be total darkness. The "shadows" added by mappers are more like baked-in ambient occlusion, which will look good with or without shadows.

The shadows in this screenshot are much darker than the finished product will be. They are pitch-black because they are using a very simple method for displaying shadows, basically a binary shadowed/not-shadowed.

[Mohican]

Big, I noticed that the shadows of small objects like units and npcs look very poor (like 2-3 square blocks).
How do games like savage 2 manage to make decent shadows for both near and far objects?

[biggeruniverse]

What you see there is a Uniform Shadow Map, which has one image target that it renders the whole scene on to from the point of view of the light. What I've been working on (and silverback is not cooperative) is Light Space Perspective Shadow Map, which considers the location of the viewer, and the direction the viewer is looking and optimizes the view from the light perspective to only look at those things the viewer can see. For savage, that's the optimal solution, since it only requires one 1024x1024 shadow map to look decent. Another method that yields good results without much modification to the engine is Cascaded Shadow Maps, which splits up the scene into subsections and renders the scene from the light's view on several sequential shadow maps, each of which is a Uniform Shadow Map. For a good case, this takes 3 splits, which would be three 1024x1024 shadow maps, hardly optimal for low-end hardware.

They could be using one of these, or another shadow map method. Probably not using shadow volumes, since they don't handle texture maps (leaves and bushes and such).

[luke]

looks good! next some SSAO? 

[biggeruniverse]

Ha! Not in savage 

[Mefix]

(' ')<

[biggeruniverse]

This is mainly for Tirza, who has been very critical of the shadows being too dark:



Shadows implemented with GLSL shaders!   Shaders have never worked for terrain (will have to fix that) but you can see on all the objects that in fact everything is shadowed, but it's not jet black anymore. Much more realistic, and actually playable this way.

Compare (no GLSL):

[Mohican]

Big, while you are doing some GLSL work, can you fix the normal maps for Terrain textures?
Nice progress btw!

[biggeruniverse]

Big, while you are doing some GLSL work, can you fix the normal maps for Terrain textures?
Nice progress btw!

That should work fine now!



EDIT: My favorite is the pred that just sacced and you can see the shadow of his flying body on the wall behind the garr..

[cutter]

Why are some of the shadows so jagged? Are the models that they are shadows from made poorly or are the shadows messed up?

[Mefix]

its a work in progress! Lets trust in bunis sence of quality (' ')<