Hi

Its great to see the 10X faster stencil shadow support but its really annoying to miss one very useful feature for shadows.
We simply want to have most of our models cast dynamic shadows
, but as soon as a model goes away from the view frustum , then even the shadow is culled. Also, when the sun is around the horizon , the shadow of smaller objects becomes longer(which is perfect) but again it gets culled as soon as the object is out of the view frustum. If there can be a 'SHADOW_ALWAYS' flag for entities it would definetly make the shadow feature awesome.

regards
zazang

This was already asked several times; the best solution is to increase the entity's shadow range by placing dummy vertices around it in MED. We've also mentioned this in the manual.

A general flag for rendering all shadows regardless of the view frustum would only work in very simple levels where the FPS does not matter. Doing something with all entities without any clipping is a very effective frame rate killer.

Ok thank you. But wont placing dummy vertices spoil the stencil shadows ?.
(because stencil shadows need closed meshes)

I am not asking for a general rendering flag that renders shaoow regardless of the view frustum.
but I was thinking of a solution in these lines :-

There can be a global engine var like disable_shadow_culling which will have 2 values :-

0 (default) - The engine behaves the same way as it behaves now , meaning that it culls the shadow of any entity away from view frustum. This way fps is high.

1 - The shadows of all entities whose 'SHADOW_ALWAYS' flag is set will not be culled.
So those entities whose SHADOW_ALWAYS is not set , will still cull their shadows.

I am sure there will be many levels(and with the current hardware) where fps is not a big concern, but having great realsitic shadows will add a lot to the game !.

This is definetly a scaleable option.

regards
zazang

Maybe a threshold would be better.
Something like:

my.shadowtreshold = 64; // don´t cull my shadow until I´m 64 quants outside the view frustrum

Dummy vertices don't spoil shadows because they are not rendered when not connected to a triangle. They only increase the bounding box.

A general threshold would also be a solution, but not as good because normally you'll want different thresholds depending on the entity size and type. With the planned shadowmapping shader, this problem won't occur anyway. But I'll check it I can implement a threshold or something similar in a future version.