Shadows

Spend most of today getting shadows to work and got it working in an acceptable fashion for demo#1.

What is the issue you ask? Well, the first observation is that the view distance in a third person view game is far larger compared to an indoor setting like Heroine Rumble was. The second is the player moves and looks around, and there is potentially a much large area that the shadow need to cover. The underlying issue, in short, is that a statically placed shadow setup no longer works. And it requires something smarter.

I'll spare you the details, but the end result is a shadow system that only "draws" shadows at regions where the camera/player can see.



But even then, it was not quite good enough. Here is why:

When the shadow bounds is large, there is very little resolution when viewed close:





Picking a smaller shadow "bounds" results in nicer shadows:



However, it leads to problems when views far away:



I didn't manage to completely solve the problem yet, but I have reached a good enough compromise for demo#1. That is, use a small shadow bound for nice shadows, and don't draw shadows when far away: