ZGameEditor forum

There was a thread about this a bit earlier, but it was quite old, so I thought it couldn't hurt asking again. Would built in support for 3d shadows, automatically cast from light sources, be a possibility to add?

I'm using fakes shadows for the moment, but automatic support would be very handy. If this is complicated and takes time to implement I understand that. But I thought I'd mention it just in case, since it's pretty much the only 3D engine feature I miss in ZGE for the moment. Just thinking, since so many other great things have been added lately.

Hi Imerion,

Imerion wrote:Would built in support for 3d shadows, automatically cast from light sources, be a possibility to add?

While i'm certainly not against a easy-to-use built-in solution, which technique is best can differ significantly depending on your specific situation. General viewpoint, indoor or outdoor, number of lights, light types, dynamic or static, bitmap or stencil, forward or deferred, shader or fixed-function .. there are a lot of variables at play.

Can you describe your situation? Perhaps someone can provide a example for your specific needs

K

I can see what you mean, a single solution would probably not be good for all purposes, so implementing an easy-to-use function might not be so easy.

I have two games where something like this would be useful. Both are still very early in development, so I asked mostly to be ready.

The first is an FPS. It has lots of uneven terrain, so it would need shadows that could fall from buildings and objects and not "clip" through the ground. It might be possible to do with textures with baked in shadows for still objets, but would be harder for moving ones. Light source doesn't need to move.

The other is a top-down 3D rpg-type of game. Something like this : http://img.gamefaqs.net/screens/0/7/7/g ... 24_2_7.jpg
It would also need shadows as in above, but here it would be nice to have a moving light source. Ground is for the most part flat, so this would probably be easier to fake in some way.

Again, there's no need to write an example, implement this or so for the moment. Who knows, once I get further into these projects I might have figured something out myself. But the above is what I'm thinking anyway.