Increase and/or allow modification of the shadow casting radius

[Omega]

It appears that shadows are only casted by objects close to the camera. I'm not sure if it's a box or radius or what, but it'd be nice if we had a way to expand this area which determines whether or not an object casts a shadow. As it stands, I shadows tend to flicker on and off and moving the camera a miniscule amount to the side could make a shadow appear or disappear in a very noticeable way. Obviously shadows are graphically intensive, so some people wouldn't benefit from an enhanced shadow casting radius, but I could argue that if such is the case, you should disable shadows anyway.

As it stands, shadows seem incredibly awkward because of that appearing and disappearing. Most modern machines should have no difficulty with, say, twice as much shadows, anyway.

[MoLAoS]

When I was adding the functionality to make map objects placeable in game I had a super long time where I had made a dumb error and it would only display shadows. It took me forever to figure out what I had forgotten but I noticed a lot of shadow issues. Basically if you move the screen only a little distance shadows disappear and often it cuts shadows off or in half on a straight line.

My understanding is that its because closer to the camera things are sized normally and farther away they are smaller, which is good. But the shadow rendering box appears to be a quad and so it doesn't reach the edges of the screen the farther towards the top you go. This could be totally wrong because its hard to be totally sure where an error is in computers.  So many options. Or it could be this and the shadow box is too small in general and so forth or it could be just that the box is too small.

[Coldfusionstorm]

Yes, ive had this too Shadows flickering is constant in every game for me, i tought it was the "poor" performance of megaglest on my pc resulting in momentarily low framerates thus turning shadows of (megaglest does this when the PC seems to have trouble keeping up).

[titi]

there is only one shadow texture which is used to cover the regien around the camera you mentioned. If you want to change this a completly different shadow system will be needed.
Only thing I can imagine is that you can make the shadow region bigger, loosing shadow quality....

By the way: For me the most annying part regarding shadow are the "negative" shadows from objects going into the ground resulting in shadows in the wrong direction towards the light ( Mountains)

[Coldfusionstorm]

Couldn't we just try to increase the radius of the shadow texture? or marke the texture larger?. (is this texture something that is placed in the mg/data folder or and if yes, could one just increase the size of the texture to make it fit more?).

[titi]

Its already in the ingame options! But currently its only used to raise the shadow resolution/quality. I prefer more shadow quality instaed of a bgger range beeing shadowed.

[Coldfusionstorm]

Can we at least agree that everthing within the current viewscreen should be properly shadowed?

[Omega]

Its already in the ingame options! But currently its only used to raise the shadow resolution/quality. I prefer more shadow quality instaed of a bgger range beeing shadowed.

Why not both? A larger texture stretched over a larger area? A weaker computer might use a smaller texture (but I think it'd look better stretched over a larger area, so that shadows wouldn't be unrealistically flickering on and off as you move), while a better computer would use a larger texture. The options menu caps at 1028 pixels, which is still a pretty small texture in my opinion. I can't help but feel that MegaGlest's graphical capabilities are limited so that people with ancient machines who shouldn't be gaming can play while people with higher end machines don't even have the option to do better.

[Coldfusionstorm]

i have to agree, at least make a option availiable for us with higher end systems.
Shadow flickering is really annoying.