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Shadows

by Brian Kirchgessner · in Torque Game Engine · 03/22/2006 (1:24 pm) · 3 replies

In my game Dogfight i have some very large interior objects that take forever to light a mission.

I was thinking about taking out the baked shadows in the terrain and interior files in order to apply the same dynamic shadow effects that smaller objects have.

Is this a good idea or is this asking for trouble of network and internet play.

Just so you know dogfight is going to support up to 50 players over internet and lan.
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Torque Owner Brian Kirchgessner
Prosimian Productions
#1
03/22/2006 (2:49 pm)
Would I have to incorporate the dynamic shadows to the source code files, example: terdata.cc, interior.cc, or is there another way of doing this, possibly through scripting?

Employee David Montgomery-Blake
David MontgomeryBlake
#2
03/22/2006 (3:03 pm)
Well, you could include the Lighting Kit. Otherwise, I believe you will have to touch the source to play with shadows.

Torque Owner Clark Fagot
#3
03/22/2006 (3:57 pm)
Brian, you don't want to do that. The dynamic shadows have one advantages over the baked in shadows: they are dynamic. The disadvantages are that they are slower and less robust. By slower I mean they are slower during runtime (not load time), and the larger the shadow the slower they are (this is because the shadow must be cast over a larger area of the world, so the query for geometry to cast the shadow onto is larger). By less robust I mean that there can be some tricky cases that aren't handled perfectly. E.g., if the terrain is steeper than the light direction, you end up seeing cracks in the shadow.

Finally, realize that the load time cost of baking the lighting into the mission that you are experiencing only occurs the first time you run that mission. So if you were to ship the game, you could ship with the lightmaps already generated.