Shadows

[xXxFANCYCAPYBARA36xXx]

This isnt too important ( although it would look beyond A W E S O M A Z I N G G G G G G G G G ! ! ! ! ! ) but it would be so dope to at some point in development see shadows bein casted from houses

The way I was thinkin is that it uses the current "shadow" system where stuff you havent seen is black, and stuff u recently seen but no longer are looking at turn a like slightly darker shade. 

Maybe you could use something like that to make those "shadows" appear during daytime and make those appear on every wall tile / building in a way i dont know to explain but hopefully you know what i mean?

what do you think about that?

heres a pic i found its a photoshop of what pz would look like with shadows

Theyre very different from what I mean and likely NEED the houses to be full 3d models for it to happen, but this is just to show how different and how much cooler daytime would look with shadows

i believe lighting and shading plays a huge part in atmosphere 

 

Edited May 31, 2017 by zoeyflower

[Fuji]

You can do this without 3D models, but it'd take a lot of work; notably normal maps for every single sprite (which considering Mash just remade all the sprites, it's not too out of the question.)

 

http://www.mattgreer.org/articles/dynamic-lighting-and-shadows/

[EnigmaGrey]

It's pretty much a confirmed "no" at this point. Was also the last time this image was posted (?).

 

Got to draw the line somewhere or this is never going to finished.

[TheWraithPlayer]

6 hours ago, EnigmaGrey said:

It's pretty much a confirmed "no" at this point. Was also the last time this image was posted (?).

 

Got to draw the line somewhere or this is never going to finished.

Would be a nice mod though.

[Damien Darkside]

Damn, because it would be really great for both shadows and lighting to be implemented. Lighting of course being sunsets and such making orange glows.

 

Oh well.

[xXxFANCYCAPYBARA36xXx]

As i mentioned already it would 100% only utilize the current shaders that turn stuff black when u havent seen em or a slightly darker shade when youve seen em but are not looking. basically, something like wall tiles "emitting" a "light" thats a dark transparent shade of blueish during daytime that would contrast again the bright floor, im sure it would take a shitton of dedication to do but i dont think a mod for that is impossible

if someone knows how to mod the shader maybe? or wall tile properties? or maybe just a script that automatically emits those "shadows" from every wall tile. it would be amazing to see.

then just need some sweetfx mods to fine tune the lighting again, i kinda miss the original shading that was bright and sunny and warm looking vs the "bleak and sad" one now, although its not a big problem to me so if its not gonna happen its all cool aslong as ill get to see the animations update sometime 

Edited June 1, 2017 by zoeyflower

[EnigmaGrey]

That's not how shadows work in game: It's just the inverse of a single texture applied to the screen in the shape of a circle. Shadows under objects are just a single circle texture. You'd have to either do by hand gradients of every shadow angle or procedurally generate them somehow, such as redoing all elements in the game with 3D models to cast the shadow from.

 

Lots of light sources murder performance. That's why so much of it is cached in the map files. (Delete a house, it's shadow remains.) Malls, big buildings with lots of windows, you'll see FPS tank near them. Likewise if someone uses a lot of lamps / torches on a pillar.

 

Colored overlay to hint at sunrise/sunset/weather though? That'd be cool. There's two or three texture mods that make a stab at overlay effects in the workshop. (A black and white shader for nonvisible areas would be really neat, as well.)

[xXxFANCYCAPYBARA36xXx]

just wanna make sure were basically talking about you know how an area is black, and when you look at it but theres several trees for example the vision behind those trees remains black cause u cant see past them? and they leave that shade that goes to the direction youre looking towards, and it looks like theyre huge black shadows stretching past the screen thats what im talking about basically, the stuff you can control with lightning quality where the lowest one makes them all be darker tiles while the highest setting makes them look like soft shadows?

im not sure if it takes a huge hit on performance since i have a terribad pc and it runs well on smoother settings with no frame drops, but then again this game is the apotheosis of masterful optimization and theres probably some amazing algorithm or something behind that that wouldnt work the shadow way and just kill performance badly 

 

the colored overlay sounds awesome i like it 

 

maybe you could include a sky horizon in place of the clock for when you dont have any form of clock on you, you get a lil horizontal like 40x120 bar that will show you what the sky looks like and youd have four base horizons, purplish for morning blue for day orange for evening and daaaaaaark blueish for midnight and then you get cloud overlays depending on the current weather (clear for no rain inbound, clouds covering the bottom for rain inbound, full clouds for rain) i love skies and id love to see that or maybe a mod that adds this

ik for sure that the game had something like that where it showed a sun and clouds and such as like weather icons but i think its no longer ingame

[Geras]

Shadows would be awesome.

Too bad it's so much work/trouble, though.

[Lexx2k]

The engine is already 2.5d, so shadows could probably get generated from low-poly bounding box objects assigned to each scenery piece. Even Jagged Alliance 2 17 years ago used 3d models for object hit boxes even though everything was made out of 2d sprites. If PZ can't do this in 2017, then truth be told, the engine is garbage. :>

Edited June 4, 2017 by Lexx2k

[Fuji]

35 minutes ago, Lexx2k said:

The engine is already 2.5d, so shadows could probably get generated from low-poly bounding box objects assigned to each scenery piece. Even Jagged Alliance 2 17 years ago used 3d models for object hit boxes even though everything was made out of 2d sprites. If PZ can't do this in 2017, then truth be told, the engine is garbage. :>

3D models is kind of an overstatement.  Regardless, calculating hit detection is one thing, it's another to calculate a shadow every single frame for all 200 objects on screen.  Hell, most modern FPS games can barely handle that.

 

(But yeah, engine's kinda limited what-with all the Java...)

[Lexx2k]

Well, you don't have to calculate the shadow every frame. Except for critters and vehicles, nothing in the game moves, so the only time shadows would need to be dealt with is when a new object gets placed or something is removed. Normal shadow "movement" can be checked on every time tick or every half an ingame hour or w/e. The game is quite abstract with such things anyway.

Edited June 4, 2017 by Lexx2k