dont most current video cards support hardware shadows? i mean seeing as most games sence unreal 2 had shadows, and that they really dont hurt performance that much if you have hardware support for them. shadows just add so much to the game and the imersion hey create in a space sim would be awesome. i think they would look awesome in combination with kazan's planned asteroid revamp.
shadow isnt shadow.
The "casual sun" won't be enough. If we aim for realism, that is...
Quoteshadow isnt shadow.
:wtf: :D
if people would be almost as happy with objects only shadowing themselves that would make the project vastly easier, as the majority of the hacitry I did was in makeing every object in game draw it'self four times (once full lit, once for the back of the shadow once for the front of the shadow and once for the in-shadow geometry) you have to draw everything, then draw everything again, then draw everything AGAIN, then, you have to draw it all over one last time.
Because there are many people out there with ATI x850 graphics cards, and dua core 64bit processors with 2 gigs of ram.
is the aim of the source code project to make a game where everyone can crank the settings to max and get playable framerates, or to improve the capabilities of the engine?
As for Shade's comment about people assuming it'll be easy? I don't think anyone is assuming that. Neither are we nagging. Just expressing an interest in / enquiring about the possibility of. If it's upsetting you guys though then I for one will shut up and more onto a different topic.I wasn't referring to this thread in particular in that comment, so no need to worry in that regard :) It just happens to be one of the main factors in whether something gets done or not, as it is a free-time project and one still needs to be in the mood regardless of other factors, and that particular thing is one of the main reasons why one might not be in the mood for coding.
At the current moment, for example, I'm on a Semperon (socket 462) 2400+ (1.67 Ghz) with 1gb DDR3200 and an 8x Sapphire Radeon 9600XT, Audigy 2 SE and IDE HDD's. I'm just now laying in to get parts for a 939 X2 3800+, PCI-E e-VGA 7600, 2gb DDR3200 and SATA HDD's. It's roughly $500+ (counting 3rd Party HS solutions and a new Power Supply). Can I really afford it? No, but I have different circumstances than most so I'm doing it one piece at a time.Already mentioned here, Crysis:
Secondly, I have yet to see a single new game MINIMUM spec that states those requirements. I have yet to see it as a minimum spec for any game yet to be released. I could see it as a RECOMMENDED, but not as a minimum.
And for someone starting out with little in the way of income over expenses and no computer trying to settle in to one, even the Ars Technica budget box may be outside thier budget. And to some fashion, the SCP need's to avail itself to anyone who can atleast meet somewhere around or slightly above the recommended system specs for FS2. (Or atleast degrade nicely enough to make itself available to such a machine.)And just what forbids these people to run fs2_open without every available switch turned on?
I don't know if just adding a little part of a shadow technic and then later adding more will be good. Taking code in then out again and so on. I would love to see shadows but somewhere it was mentioned that if the shader system would work correct it would be easier to do shadows so I say concentrate on the shader system first and then add the shadows.
Minimum Requirements
CPU: Athlon 64 3000+/Intel 2.8ghz
Graphics: Nvidia 6600/X800GTO (SM 2.0)
RAM: 768Mb/1Gb on Windows Vista
HDD: 6GB
Internet: 256k+
Optical Drive: DVD
Software: DX9.0c with Windows XP