Those of you who follow developments with the SCP will have noticed that Valathil has been doing some very impressive work getting shadows to work in the FS2_Open Engine. A couple of days ago he released a test build which basically meant that production on Diaspora stopped for a few hours while we all decided to see what the game looked like in it.
Since the game looked really good, I told CooperHawkes (who usually makes our trailers these days) to grab some footage for the fans to see. So here you go.
Self Shadowing Test - Youtube link
Music : Diaspora Mission Briefing Track by PhRey.
Since Valathil isn't a member of the team this is really the work of the SCP being used to make us look good. But we figured that it's been a while since we showed off some eye candy, so we'd be forgiven for that.
Now we need to point out that this code is still very experimental so we can't promise it will be in R1. It generally takes quite a while to stabilise big new features to the level where they're ready for inclusion in a release build of the engine. As you might have noticed from earlier posts Diaspora is slowly inching closer to a release so it will be interesting to see whether this feature is done quickly enough for it to appear in R1.
If not, it will be in a patch/R2 since it requires very little effort on our part to make sure it works with our game.