Shadows/Lighting

Feedback on past, current, and future development.
Locked
User avatar
lgromanowski
Site Admin
Posts: 1193
Joined: 05 Aug 2011, 22:21
Location: Wroclaw, Poland
Contact:

Shadows/Lighting

Post by lgromanowski »

tombofsoldier wrote: So thinking about the future and the possibility of shadows in the game.

Parallel Split Shadow Maps look good, but if there's going to be the possibility of having correct shadows and very large view distances then huge shadow maps would be needed, and take up a lot.

However, currently the newest terrain system created by Sinbad supports slowly changing lighting anyway, since blah blah have to update the lightmap and etc.

However, if a lightmap could be used for much of the terrain/statics then we could get proper looking shadows anyway visa vis something like this: http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/04/Catching-baked-shadows

It would look good, work with everything, and in all likelihood be fairly fast. Of course this depends on a lot and would be fairly far off, but still possible.

On a side note, assuming a lightmap would be used at all, and in support of mods, it would need to be re-calculated everytime a different mod was added/subtracted from the active list. So not only would PSSM still have more than a few distinct advantages, but for people with slower computers it would probably be best just to stick with a single omni-directional light like in original Morrowind in any case. Lightmaps might be fast to render, but not to calculate.
pogzy wrote: I am not a specialist but it doesn't seems to be an issue because Ogre3D handles different shadows algorithms implementations as stated in the manual:http://www.ogre3d.org/docs/manual/manual_70.html

In fact this point will be handled by Ogre3D or maybe one of it's plug-in, it shouldn't be computed in OpenMW. So that way, whatever the current implementation, we rely on the future evolutions of Ogre3D. But shadows may be resources hungry if they are used with wrong or too realistic settings, this point should be handled by OpenMW.

Bye
Locked