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Shadows computed incorrectly

by Chris \"Hobbiticus\" Weiland · in Torque Game Engine · 03/27/2003 (12:21 pm) · 6 replies

Line 2495 of shapeBase.cc reads:
Point3F lightDir(0.57f,0.57f,-0.57f);
which is in the shadow generation function. So the shadow is NEVER computed correctly unless that is the real light direction. If you change the sun direction, the shadow never moves.

Just thought y'all would like to know
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Torque 3D Owner Daniel Eden
#1
03/27/2003 (9:40 pm)
There's lots of little bugs like that throughout the entire engine unfortunately. Ever noticed that splash rings don't show if you're not the server, for example? Simple fix to add to the preload, but still...

Torque Owner Chris \"Hobbiticus\" Weiland
#2
04/07/2003 (3:18 pm)
change that to:
LightManager * lManager = gClientSceneGraph->getLightManager();
   LightInfoList mLights;
	mLights.clear();
   lManager->getLights(mLights);
   AssertFatal(mLights.size(), "No lights available!");
	VectorF lightDir = mLights[0]->mDirection;
and you should be good to go.

Torque Owner Mz
#3
04/07/2003 (4:04 pm)
Well, you're assuming that light 0 is always the sunlight. It is currently, but only because nothing's registering a light before it when the scene graph is traversed. That could potentially change, so watch out!

Associate James Lupiani
Sickhead Games
#4
04/07/2003 (6:08 pm)
You could call getBestLights() with the shape's bounding box and use that instead.

Torque Owner Chris \"Hobbiticus\" Weiland
#5
04/08/2003 (1:05 pm)
actually, that's exactly how sceneRender works - it assumes the sun is 0, so if something changes, the whole engine goes to hell :)

Torque Owner Mz
#6
04/08/2003 (1:09 pm)
Hmm. I didn't notice any explicit assumptions of that sort, but then I didn't look exteremly hard. Do you remember where I might find an example of such?

It struck me as the proper thing to do to add to the API to grab the sunlight direction, and that's what I did when I needed it.