I just wanted to ask regarding the news text I read and telling:

"After a lot of discussions it became clear that real time shadowing was a technique that the engine could not really get away with across the wide breadth of PCs. We decided to do away with that technique and employ a shadow map baking process. This pre-bakes all the shadows for your maps, the downside is that it’s intensive number crunching work."

Does that mean dynamic shadows will be gone for good? Or is this referring to the world shadows casted by the global light source only?
Are small, dynamic lights casting shadows possible? Will they be?

Best regards,

Ivan / Johann / Ertlov

I took it to mean the static entities shadows would be prebaked, and dynamic entities would still have real time shadowing, going by the blog entries. It may not be of course, which would be a great shame, and would look rubbish. You can't have really cool baked shadows and then break the illusion with crappy simulated blob shadows everywhere else. I don't think they will go this way.

All shadows (static and dynamic) are currently only cast by the sun in Reloaded. Individual lights have not been worked on yet so I'm hoping static lighting will contribute to the new ambient occlusion pre baking and dynamic lights will be able to cast shadows but this has not yet been confirmed and work has not yet started.

I'm thinking the same as DVader that static entities will be pre baked with the light mapper and dynamic entities / characters will have dynamic shadows as this would make sense but Lee is still fighting an uphill battle with performance at the moment so we will have to see how well he comes out the other side when the next BETA is released.

At the moment I can't see us being able to have indoor and outdoor environments all in the same map unless the occlusion culling system is really working properly but I hope to be proved wrong and will wait to see what the construction kit brings to the table. There is still a lot of work to be done on lighting though.

Any believable indoor scene is out of the question right now unless it´s one without any light source.

So much is unclear can we get one of the team to let us know what is going on i asked a few weeks back about this?



I also see it has been deleted thanks for that!

It´s totally OK if things are still unclear, however, I am curious what the plans are regarding lights & shadows. The lack of real-time shadow casting with moving lights was the most hindering issue on FPSC classic that has never been tackled.

Yea Ertlov that's more or less what i asked.

Dynamic shadows are not gone, they are required in any good engine, they have been removed in favour of this new pre-baking method for the moment. Once the pre-baked shadows are in-engine and working correctly then some decent dynamic shadows will be added later down the line.



I think we can all agree the old dynamic shadow system needed ripping out and improving to give better visuals and performance.



It is all part of a long term plan.

That about sums it up. Dynamic shadows aren't gone, but are reserved for objects that need them.

ok guys sounds good removed but not removed



can i ask what happens with say for example a crate/box and the shadow is baked if you have a light source who will take control of the shadow and will shadow be removed.



Also the torch will that have any effects on shadows.

the torch.. I almost forgot we had 1 lol...
those are good questions though tattie m8!!

Whats about day & night level?, the sun/moon does not remain static, it moves around the map and the shadows too.
For example the shadow cast by a building changes position as it the sun or moon does.

3com

I thought day/night was taken out?

No m8 its still in f7 when ingame but i think it will be removed

f7? thought it was f12 lol no wonder it don't work hahaha... I need to re read those instructions I guess

Yes we have to assume that switching over to the ambient occlusion lightmapper will mean the end for dynamic time of day but this is something we only see in a couple of games like Skyrim and GTA5 anyway so I don't think its crucial for Reloaded to be successful.

I don't think we have to worry about the day and night moving shadows because the sun go down and comes up in the same place of the map. all it does is fade out from daytime skybox and fade into the night time skybox. giving us the illusion of it. but what make it so bad is the ambient of the terrain does not change at all. it should go from light to dark with the skybox. all well never care for it all. it's that lee is trying to make this engine run on mid end cards which makes sense. that was probably the best thing about fpsc is it can run on any pc no matter almost how low end it was. today any pc can fpsc which makes it worth my time using it. which the reason he stuck with dx9 because it's compatible with a wide range of os. if lee was to get reload on mac os it would a good thing for tgc because not many engines like this is on there. but my point is I can see why tgc is doing what they are doing with the engine trying to make it more compatible with other pc's. at this point I'm waiting to see how 1009 turns out.

So, will FPSCR will be able to cast both dynamic as well as pre-baked shadows right? Well, if a static object will not be able to cast dynamic shadows, there wont be much use for a flashlight in that engine. And, as they are saying, they want to make it into a world class engine, so there must be day and night cycles as a result, the big terrain must also be changing shadows with respect to the sun, hence there wont be much use of pre-baked shadows (unless and until it is an option made available for lower end PCs). So, is there any solution for that?

So another thing removed can they give any light on my question as this is the second time i asked this first one got deleted

@TattieBoJangle I'm going to go with no about the torch since it does not have any effect know on the dynamic shadows. once shadows are bake like that they are not ment to move. the only reason to keep the dynamic shadows so the dynamic objects can have s

For those not familiar with my 'entire' blog text (and I don't blame you), the short answer to the question of light and shadow is thus; I have been working on an ambient occlusion light mapper to provide a pre-baked static shadow to take over all the static shadows in the current scene to (a) make them look better and (b) introduce ambient occlusion mapping for free and (c) drop a lot of shadow rendering work to increase overall performance. I am certainly not getting rid of dynamic shadows (as it took me months to add and perfect them), they will simply be employed for dynamic entities only which means less real-time shadow 'stuff' to process per cycle.

I will be removing day and night cycles for the first Steam launch as there is a lot of hidden gremlins to finishing this feature and I want to give myself more time for core work and testing. I am also leaving it the ability for static entities to cast dynamic shadows in the engine as there is still a place for this on higher end systems which can handle the extra processing required for game wide real-time static shadows.

For more information, check out my blog which is currently chronicling the completion of the pre-bake feature of the engine, and in the next days you will see me merge this back into the current shader configurations. It may mean a new set of shader techniques on a new sliders panel toggle, one which uses the pre-bake and one which continues to use real-time shadows. The pre-bake renders the static shadows from pre-created texture images but will combine with dynamic shadows to create a uniform render experience. I also have a few more ideas how dynamic shadow casters can be improved upon but we'll take things one step at a time. You are also welcome to comment in the blog post so I can get feedback on my approach to 'having my cake and eating it', that is, 'better visuals without sacrificing performance'.

Would that mean that a lamp or flashlight pointed at a column next to a static desk filled with dynamic props would only result in shadows from the props, but not in shadows from the column and the desk?

The flashlight would not cast any shadows as the position of the flashlight is the same as the camera so no shadows would be perceived. What would happen is the illumination from the flashlight would defeat any existing shadows, allowing you to see things which have been shrouded in darkness.

I must admit to not liking the flashlight at all at the moment. It seems far too bright on objects and quite dull on the floor. It doesn't overpower shadows properly, so you can still see them clearly where the torch is pointed. It also changes from the directed light look, to a omni looking light on certain terrain shader settings. It really needs more work to make it look realistic. Hopefully this will be addressed also, while in the process of tweaking the visuals later on.

Yes I think this can be looked at when I work on integrating the dynamic lighting system into the visual overhaul which will start mid-October. I want to try a few ideas such as using a low resolution skybox mipmap as an ambience cube map instead of a solid ambient colour to blend the scene better with the sky, and as part of that I am removing all textures to focus on clamping the 'lighting view' for a good zero to one range. As part of that I will be sorting out the static vs dynamic entities and lights to ensure they all blend together nicely. For a proper 'cone light' for the flash light, it will eat some performance in all the shaders (entity, character, terrain, veg) as a cone light is more expensive than a point light. This week I could not possibly even think about that