Re: [Algorithms] RTS simple circle shadows

[Martin S. <ms...@he...>]

>Actually, you could even get real* shadows using this method -- you'd render
>the object as normal, but use the top-down orthographic projection and a
>model transform which flattened and skewed the object according to the light
>direction.
>  
>
This is exactly what I did in Rome: Total War and the results were 
perfectly acceptable (well much better than just simple blob shadow 
anyways). More precisely there are 2 "micro" maps that do this , one 
going out to about 64 meters from the camera and the other going to 256 
meters with cross fading between them then fading to simple blob shadows 
at the end of the second map. This was done to reduce the texture cost 
of it all so we could get away with 2x512x512  textures and look 
acceptable rather than one big 2048x2048 going all the way out to 256 
meters. There's some noticable crawling at these resolutions but by 
keeping them light and subtle its no *too* noticable (i hope;) That said 
we were really heaving for texture space as we needed to run on 32meg 
cards and also decided not to use any pixel shaders so we could work on 
the broadest spectrum of hardware so YMMV.

Martin