Missing gfx features in v2.4. (compared to v2.1 of the game)

[MCR]

These are some screenshots from v2.1 of the game. Where have these features gone ?

[MCR]

Soft shadows, soft lighting:

[MCR]

Actors standing in the shadow/light:

[MCR]

It seems that in the actual git master version shadows have disappeared completely, also there does not seem to be much difference between day/night versions of a map. 

Please bring back light & shadow !

[MCR]

Here we have the farm map @ daytime:

[MCR]

The same map @ night: 

[MCR]

Did anyone else notice the absence of shadows or is it just me ?

[Crystan]

Well havnt noticed it because i cant dl the newest maps. Probably the shadows are now rendered realtime and you cant see them because of the ATI bug?

[MCR]

Probably the shadows are now rendered realtime and you cant see them because of the ATI bug?

Well, actually this is what Arisian was working on before he left, but I do not believe that such a big step forward would not be announced 

[H-Hour]

I'm not sure what you mean by "soft shadows, soft lighting", but it looks to me like you have compiled the maps without lighting. I have shadows in my maps.

The main difference seems to be that the saturation of colors has been kicked up quite a bit. But this could probably be a number of things.

[MCR]

I'm not sure what you mean by "soft shadows, soft lighting", but it looks to me like you have compiled the maps without lighting. I have shadows in my maps.

By soft shadows I mean the edges of the shadows, which are looking somehow smoother in the old version.

I compiled the maps using compile_maps.bat & also downloaded another version of the bsps using Muton's tool, but I am happy to hear that the shadow bug seems to be affecting just me...

Maybe someone could tell me how to compile the maps with shadows enabled...

[H-Hour]

Try this compile_maps_old.bat. Kildor sent it to me when I was having trouble with compile_maps.bat a while ago and I use it some. Put it next to the current compile_maps.bat (/contrib/scripts) and call it like:

compile_maps_old.bat farm

That should compile with lighting. Another thing you can try is to pick one tile and compile it with ufo2map.exe:

ufo2map -quant 3 -extra maps/farm/filename.map

[MCR]

Thanx.

[Muton]

Load 4x4 city map
you know this endless compiling map
It was recompiled a week ago
and i can see shadows there ....

On farm map the firebird does have a shadow while the ufo lack the shadow


My tool doesnt use -quant n
maps.mk will use -quant 4 btw
It would be nice if a mapper could clarify this option


what about maps from map-get.py ?
map-get.py upgrade
run msys.bat
cd to your ufoai source
type
contrib/scripts/map-get.py upgrade

[H-Hour]

My tool doesnt use -quant n
maps.mk will use -quant 4 btw
It would be nice if a mapper could clarify this option

I'm not sure if any of us know technically what it does, but in the end it produces much sharper shadow lines. If you look at the shadows closely, you will see that an angled shadow line comes out in small squares (like pixels). Lower quant reduces the size of these boxes to produce cleaner shadow lines. It's not the difference between "blurry" and sharp, but about straight or broken into little squares.

Mattn was playing with the default -quant setting recently, but I don't know where he left it. Small quant values (such as 2) resulted in map compiling errors for some maps (max lightmap). Quant 2 is tons better than 3 and in my opinion our goal should be to support it, but I'm not sure anyone knows a good way to get there. I was told increasing lightmap size is not a good idea.