Props for the shadows

from Sins Forums

Whoever did the shadows, simply amazing. I had to turn them down to medium to cutdown on lag but watching some of my frigates flying past my cap ship and the shadows dancing across it's hull as they prepped for phase jump... simply stunning and somehow very immersing.

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Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top

Thanks, I did most of it. Turns out all the standard ways of doing shadows don't work with a.) that many units and b.) with that much difference in scale (compare a fighter next to a titan) so I had to come up with a custom way of doing it and c.) the combination of full camera rotation and arbitrary light source position.

So yes, shadows have been around for awhile but no one that I know of has had to deal with the same issues we had to. For those among you interested in the details, the shader itself will only give you a small piece of the puzzle and should look pretty familiar but maybe I'll a write up on the new stuff done on the CPU end.

I have some other new improvements I hope to get in before release.

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Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top

Only had enough time for about 10 min tonight (must sleeeep) but I'm really digging the new visuals, especially the lighting and shadows. Looking forward to a proper run tomorrow night.

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Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top

Yep the shadows do look nice indeed, I run them on highest and they haven't caused me lag even near the end of match with 6 players.

I do find it a bit funny though that they updated pretty much everything graphically from textures on ships to skyboxes to lighting, but haven't seemed to go the extra mile and spice up the planets a bit. I mean after all the planets do get most of the screen time in my opinion, so why leave them unchanged?

Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top

The optimization is spectacular, ran an 8-man multi-system with everything on highest (which I never would have dared with Diplomacy) and everything ran smooth as butter.

I love the amount of detail in this game, being able to scale all the way down to a single fighter and have it be detailed is great, and something very few games have. Even Company of Heroes' individual units don't look quite this good.