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Since I have been working to get more lighting enhancements into the Ravenholm mod I was recalling how I don't think props can receive casted shadows from other props/brushes. I am wondering if it is possible to enable shadows onto prop surfaces or not.

I would think it would be a new shader or a complex new lighting adaptation but just figured it was worth asking anyway.

No, there's vertex lit but that's awful, just compile with -staticproppoly and -textureshadow.

You should really be posting these in the simple question thread.

If I wanted to post this in the simple questions I would have. I already know the extra compile options but that wasn't what I was asking. I want to know whether or not there is a possibility to construct a new shader/lighting option that can do just what I am talking about.

Armageddon wrote:No

There's is the deferred renderer which I'm sure you know about, it's really broken on ATi cards and it's not very practical, no radiosity, doesn't look good.

Theoretically if there was a shader that could interact with the lighting pass you could make a alpha channeled version of the separate casted shadow while still being able to see the effects of the radiosity and shading effects beneath that extra layer.

Now that is just in theory but between that and actually making a system that could do that is a whole different story.

I don't think you understand shaders.

No I don't pretend to that's why I ask questions, generalize an idea and then hear what people have to say about them. You got something to say about shaders then I would like to hear it, but otherwise I would like to actually get an opinion from some one who does.

You can do that in udk

The only enhancement I've given these type of shadows(dynamic prop/RTT) is higher resolution and disabled the use of prop's shitty shadow model for rendering. I've tried a lot to get other props to receive these shadows. Self shadowing would be awesome too. It's like that in Halo3+, dead rising, and unreal engine games. Since it looks good and is pretty cheap. Oh, and it can look better than shadow mapping self shadowing most of the time.

Gary wrote:The only enhancement I've given these type of shadows(dynamic prop/RTT) is higher resolution and disabled the use of prop's shitty shadow model for rendering. I've tried a lot to get other props to receive these shadows. Self shadowing would be awesome too. It's like that in Halo3+, dead rising, and unreal engine games. Since it looks good and is pretty cheap. Oh, and it can look better than shadow mapping self shadowing most of the time.

There is actually code in the game client that disables renderable-on-renderable shadowing due to performance reasons. Disabling this check doesn't seem to have any effect unfortunately (or maybe I'm doing something wrong, because from what I saw, there's none in the engine). It'd be useful to dig around the shadow manager.

Yeah, I tried doing it by disabling those checks too. Had no affect.

Would probably be best to do testing on ASW, since I think it has a broken option to enable this. So there might be other modifications already done in order to do the "shadow" receiving.


And these shadows are basically a type of decal right? Just dynamically drawn in code. It would be cool to get these shadows to HaloReach /UE3 quality. Especially since they would be rather cheap, sometimes looks better than shadow mapping, requires no special light placements, and they support translucency(which almost no game has with shadow mapping ).

I think those may be in place in the case that there was any code to enable such features. My guess just from basic knowledge is that there is extra code needed to drive the actual function and that the client lines were added to safe guard against it. That's just my speculation but if the ASW code has something that could help us out I would be interested in hearing about it.

The checks might be in place just for performance reasons. Like, so models don't get marked as potential receivers. Regardless of whether or not models can actually receive them.