[Dark RevenantX]

I was using the new shaders.  Unfortunately it seems they must be in a mod dir instead of the normal data dir for them to be recognized.

When I got the shadows working, I noticed that larger submodels/turrets don't cast shadows on my small fighter.

[torc]

works very good in Diaspora... less FPS impact too.... great work.

sapphire 6850 here .

[Commander Zane]

The perfomance drain is lower, that is outstanding. But I still have the disappearing models in Subspace missions that I posted during the first shadow release.

[CaptJosh]

Um, the example of so called soft shadows in space earlier in the thread is a result of light passing through the ATMOSPHERE of a planet eclipsing its own satellite. The typical example of this is of course the Terra eclipsing Luna. However, when the Luna eclipses Sol, there is no softening around the edges. The closest we get to that is the so-called "Diamond Ring" effect, where the last part of the main body of the sun to go into eclipse seems extra bright against the limb of the moon. The same effect is observed in reverse as the sun comes out of eclipse.

QED, without some sort of atmosphere, shadows in space have hard edges.

[Kolgena]

^tyvm. Will report back later with what I find.

@ CaptJosh: Read up on what penumbra shadows are. There are "soft" shadows in space.

(Besides, it's either soft shadows that look nice (and unrealistic) and run nicely, hard shadows at insane performance costs, or hard shadows with pixelated edges)

[CaptJosh]

Actually, I had forgotten point sources vs planar sources of light. Haven't been in a science class in a while...

[Kolgena]

Things run vastly smoother with this build than the previous, though I'd personally still like to see higher framerates. Shadows as they are now really do not scale well when lots of ships are in a mission.

In main-v.sdr, I tried playing around with the 1.0/2048.0 value to see if I could shrink maps and get some performance. It seems to work (shadows are blurrier, game's not crashing, frames might be higher).

tl;dr: Awesome update in shadows code.

[Valathil]

Please stop spamming the thread with this useless soft shadow discussion

• Its getting on my nerves
• I wont implement soft shadows anyway cause of performance

[Swifty]

I dunno about you Valathil, but I thoroughly enjoyed it when my own topic was turned into a HUD pitch ladder slash Lua scripting debate thread.

[jr2]

I wish there was some way to make sort of a branching discussion thread:


Main Topic
       |
Response 1
       |
Response 2
       |
De-rail / rabbit trail   -----------|
       |                                      |
Response 3                      Response 1
       |                                      |
Response 4                      Response 2
       |                                      |
De-rail /rabbit trail 2 ---------- + --------------------|
       |                                      |                           |
Response 5                      Response 3        Response 1 


etc, etc.



O, right... I just further de-railed the thread.  Don't mind me now. 

[Ace]

Um, the example of so called soft shadows in space earlier in the thread is a result of light passing through the ATMOSPHERE of a planet eclipsing its own satellite. The typical example of this is of course the Terra eclipsing Luna. However, when the Luna eclipses Sol, there is no softening around the edges. The closest we get to that is the so-called "Diamond Ring" effect, where the last part of the main body of the sun to go into eclipse seems extra bright against the limb of the moon. The same effect is observed in reverse as the sun comes out of eclipse.

QED, without some sort of atmosphere, shadows in space have hard edges.

Actually there's a little bit of fuzziness at the edges due to interference and scattering with the object, but they're much... much sharper than in an atmosphere.

[Dragon]

If the sky isn't very cloudy, shadows in atmosphere can also be really sharp (especially if the sun is shining almost directly from above and the object casting the shadow isn't transparent).

[pecenipicek]

which part of "SHUT THE **** UP ALREADY!" didnt you idiots understand?
As valathil said already, no soft shadows, no penumbra bull**** etc. performance comes first.

[Aardwolf]

If you want to discuss soft shadows, do it here. Valathil already said to cut out the off-topic stuff, as he is not going to be implementing soft shadows.

[Dragon]

Perhaps the relevant posts could be moved there, for clarity.

[Zacam]

Is it possible to adjust:

   vec3 offset[8]; float off = 1.0/2048.0;

to try and get some performance, without vastly ****ing up the rest of the code?

Possibly...you could just try it and find out. It was previously 4096. (and before that, even larger). But I'm pretty sure that it will just possibly cause issues, since the actual resolution is currently encoded in the engine.

[Vengence]

Well I wasn't expecting the soft shadow thing to get out of hand like that. Frankly its a good thing it was moved into another topic, really poisons the source topic which in all fairness is all about getting this to work. Videos look amazing though, I'm going to try this out sometime. I've got a hefty laptop so it could be interesting to see how well the thing handles shadows on mobile hardware.

[torc]

WTF are you talkin'about?

If you haven't noticed we have shadows on FS2... Please,should you be happy at least for 15 minutes before asking new staff like soft shadows?

Great job Valathil ,and thanks to all the people that help him in this feature implementation.

[Luis Dias]

OMG OMG SOFT SHADOWS WTFBBQFBIBRB!!!!!1!!!!

[jr2]

Valathil, you know, if you keep this up, they will expect you to fulfill their every dream... it can't last forever, you know...   But, seriously, awesome job!