[Dragon]

If FSO was multithreaded, you'd see both cores pop up to 100% when running The Blade Itself. Shadows are very demanding on GPU, that's why you're getting low framerates.

[Vengence]

I can also confirm that, a large space station only casts shadows on itself, but not on any of the ships docked to it or flying around it.
As you can see:

The fighter is lit up, despite being behind the border of shadow on the station's hull.

*both squeals gleefully and cringes painfully at seeing his ship in the background*

On that matter, is a sort of size based map generation going to be implemented? Fighters casting a smaller map than say a Colossus. And I don't mean to go too deep but is a 'soft' shadow being considered  . But what am I saying? Just having shadows itself is celebratory enough. I should go bake a cake and mark the day as "Shadow Day".

[Dark RevenantX]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=381Q9YC4Qow

Max settings on the shadow build, on "The Blade Itself" from BP:WiH.  FRAPS brought down the framerate considerably enough for vsync to cap me at 30fps for some of the video, and 60fps for the rest (though I recorded at 29.97fps so it doesn't really matter either way).

You can see all of the graphics glitches in the video at various points as well as its performance on a high-end machine.

[Sandwich]

And I don't mean to go too deep but is a 'soft' shadow being considered  .

Negative!! There are no soft-shadows in space! No atmosphere to spread out the light source!

OTOH, for nebulas, planetary, and missions near stars, soft-shadows would make sense.

[Dragon]

I guess that it could be really useful if we could have some way to switch between multiple sets of shaders on a per-mission basis.
This would allow disabling thruster distortion, soft shadows and other "atmospheric" features in space missions.

[Sandwich]

Thruster distortion could still make sense if you consider the engines themselves as outputting gas - kind of a localized superheated atmosphere.

[Trivial Psychic]

Imagine if we could cast shadows in nebular dust. 

[Dragon]

Thruster distortion could still make sense if you consider the engines themselves as outputting gas - kind of a localized superheated atmosphere.

It'd dissipate too quickly, if anything, the effect would really, really subtle (and constrained to the borders of the thruster).

[Sandwich]

Imagine if we could cast shadows in nebular dust. 

Ooh, you mean volumetric shadows?

[Trivial Psychic]

... so that the dust/gas in the shadow of the ship is darker than the surrounding dust/gas.

[MatthTheGeek]

Yeah, right. Find someone to implement volumetric nebulae first.

[Sandwich]

Yep, I'm pretty sure that's volumetric shadows.

Yeah, right. Find someone to implement volumetric nebulae first.

...true.

[Kolgena]

All you'd need to do is fake the sunshafts with a shader similar to the one you find in Crysis. (hehe, "all you need to do")

[Dragon]

You know, this was done at some point in FSO (though looked a bit sketchy).

[Kolgena]

Yep. It was done by that same guy who wrote lots of the original post-processing code. I heard that the sunshaft shader was a fairly buggy and unusable piece of code though.

[Spoon]

Ooooh! Debris shadows!

[Aardwolf]

And I don't mean to go too deep but is a 'soft' shadow being considered  .

Negative!! There are no soft-shadows in space! No atmosphere to spread out the light source!

OTOH, for nebulas, planetary, and missions near stars, soft-shadows would make sense.

Bull****.



Edit: oh, maybe that's what you meant by "missions near stars"? Regardless, unless it's a perfect point light, there will be some degree of "soft"

[Dark RevenantX]

For some reason, I get no shadows from this build in the F3 lab, and the game instantly crashes upon starting a mission.

[Spoon]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJ4Kh6BGSXI&hd=1

[Dark RevenantX]

Well, it doesn't crash.  It doesn't show shadows, either.  My setup is the same as I had for the previous build.