[MetalDestroyer]

It's so awesome !!! SOFT SHADOWS are so damn cool :ninja:

[Vengence]

I think I'm... going to keel over and go into a coma now... ..:DX

[sigtau]

MY BODY IS READY

...for this to go into FSO source code proper.  This kicks royal amounts of ass. 

[Kolgena]

Uh, if so, PLEASE add some option to turn it off in the launcher or something. My game is essentially unplayable with shadows on

[AndrewofDoom]

Uh, if so, PLEASE add some option to turn it off in the launcher or something. My game is essentially unplayable with shadows on

Me too. My system chokes even in peaceful scenes now because of it. =/

[MatthTheGeek]

Why do we still suffer the outdated machines ?

In all seriousness, I'm pretty confident it'll end up as an option. In any case, you can still grab old shaders to override the new ones.

[The E]

Except that won't alleviate the shadow performance impact, as the shadows are still calculated, even if they aren't rendered.

[Spoon]

Valathil has already said that there will be a quality slider for shadows. So people like me with a glorious master race pc can enjoy those 4096^ shadows like a champ.
And those less forunate can probably turn them off or set them to minimal

[G0atmaster]

Valathil, I'm curious. How much time went into coding and such from the time you were struck with the idea to the time you had semi-working shadows? This all came about so amazingly quickly! Did you do any work before your declaration at the start of the thread?

[Valathil]

Well i did some research if my idea of using a depth camera would work and found out thats the standard way of doing it =). After starting to code you could say it took me about 15hours over 2 days till i got the first working but totally hacked shadows. Then i spent like 10 hours on **** i didnt have to do as i found out later. After that i started to have a lot of real life work and was often very tired so i didnt want to code. But weekends i always tried to get something done. I dont really know how much work in hours i did now. Its not like i can send you guys a bill so i didnt pay attention to that.

[petar91]

"After that i started to have a lot of real life"

real what ? 

[G0atmaster]

...who are you!? Depth camera? All that makes me think of is a digital camera with two lenses lol.

[Aardwolf]

...who are you!? Depth camera? All that makes me think of is a digital camera with two lenses lol.

Depth camera: the camera from which the depth is drawn; See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_mapping

[Subspace Anomaly]

Uh, if so, PLEASE add some option to turn it off in the launcher or something. My game is essentially unplayable with shadows on

For people playing at 1280x760 at the best, 2048x2048 is quite huge even though it's untextured scene, especially since it might be rendered more than once.

I think to reduce the load on lower system following quite easy countermeasures may be deployed :

#Option to lower shadowmap resolution, d'oh!
#Option to lower amounts of light casting shadows (people might be ok with just sun doing it)
#Option to lower LODs for depth test scene, would greatly reduce accuracy of shadowing, but should also relieve low ends system greatly due to great difference of detail on zero and first LOD models

Considering 512x512 scene just from sun, with one LOD up, you would get pixelizated edges on shadows, many minor details would fail to cast shadows, but performance impact would be absolutely minimal, and the effect should be good enough to hide small ships behind capitals, or to make ships like Hecate appear correctly.

Since Valathil provided a patch file, I'll mess it up when I get some time. I've got some older hardware to test how it on it anyway.

[G0atmaster]

It's just hard for me to think of the player's point of view as a camera in a virtual universe.

[Dragon]

I think that there should be a config or a set of custom launcher flags for that.

[Kolgena]

Valathil has already said that there will be a quality slider for shadows. So people like me with a glorious master race pc can enjoy those 4096^ shadows like a champ.
And those less forunate can probably turn them off or set them to minimal

@Dragon, et al: Whatever is happening, it's happening. I wouldn't worry too much about how the performance customizations work before they're actually finished.

[Dragon]

I'm suggesting a way performance could be made customizable. If I suggested it after the feature is done, it'd be pointless.

[jr2]

I'm suggesting a way performance could be made customizable. If I suggested it after the feature is done, it'd be pointless.

Point.

[bigchunk1]

You know, this thread is quite amazing. 300+ replies and over 14,000 views in only a month. I haven't seen any topic on HLP meet such excitement ever, next to perhaps the release of WIH. Even in its premature state, this shadow build has created some amazing gameplay visuals. Take the dreamlike wishes and nitpicky criticism with a bricksized grain of salt. The rabble is just excited, and are merely squabbling.