DTS Static Shape Shadows

#1 Hi Marrion,

The TSStatic object shadows are automatically generated when the object has a collision mesh, the light source is static (this includes the sun), and the object receiving the shadow is an interior or terrain.

Let me know if this helps.

-John

#2 Then why do the trees in our scene not have shadows? I am using the same trees that are in the starter.fps. Our scene is noticably brighter and the shadows that we do have in our mission are more defined with the lighting pack, but the trees have no shadow. How do I adjust the brightness of the ambient lighting?

Thanks for your help,

Marrion

#3 Hi Marrion,

You need to adjust the sun object's ambient component this controls the entire mission's ambient lighting (although you can bake even more ambient lighting into interior light maps through map2dif).

-John

#4 I see that adjusting the suns lighting and color affect the ambient lighting of the scene. I now see that our DTS objects do cast shadows, but only on other dts objects. They do not cast any shadows on the ground. Do you have any idea what could be causing this? When I click recieve sun light I can see the side of the tree that is facing the sun is bright and the other side it dark, but the dark side of the tree has no shadow on the ground. I would post a picture, but I don't know where to upload the picture.

Thanks,

Marrion Cox

#5 Hi Marrion,

The Lighting Pack doesn't add DTS to DTS shadows it sounds like you've added a few resources or have a modified engine. If the engine was modified before the Lighting Pack integration and you've used the patch file it may not have completely updated your source. I recommend going through the Integration Guide to verify your integration or patching a clean TGE (1.2.2 or HEAD from 7/30 8/15) and then slowly merging in your changes into the new TGE source tree.

-John

#6 Hi,

I did the manual integration, because the patch would not work; i used the HEAD version from AUG 18th. Is there an integration guide for the 8/15 HEAD version? if so, where do I get it?

Thanks,

Marrion

#7 Hi Marrion,

You'll need to retrieve TGE HEAD from 8/15 and then use the Integration Guide provided with the pack.

-John

#8 My integration docs only go to the 7/15 HEAD. How do I get the new docs?

Thanks,

Marrion

#9 Right now there is only one Integration Guide, you can use it with any TGE up to 8/15.

-John

#10 I did the integration totally manually, and I don't remember where, but there was one section that I totally comented out and added the integrated code because what was there did not match the integration guides BEFORE section. I just commented out the whole section and added the section that was in the guide. It is posible that that is what might be causing the problem, but I can't remember where it was, and there is hundreds of changes that were made. Next week we have to send a beta copy of our game to the Army and I am working my butt off trying to get this thing to the point where I can send it to them. I don't have alot of time to go back through the code line by line to find the section. Otherwise I would email you the code so you could check it out. Any ideas?

Marrion Cox

#11 Are you using TGE from 8/15 or 8/18? A lot of changes were added into TGE after 8/15.

-John

#12 We are using the 8/18/04 HEAD.

#13 I think you're misunderstanding what I'm saying after 8/15 TGE's changes created an incompatibility with the Lighting Pack. This won't be resolved for a little while, so in the meantime only use TGE 1.2.2 or HEAD up to 8/15.

For more information see "TGE 1.3" in my latest plan.

-John

#14 I had a problem with no shadow as well and I changed the sun's azmith to something other than 0 and I got all my shadows to work.

#15 Howard,

Excellent point - there's an obscure bug in TGE that prevents interiors from casting shadows when the sun is at a certain point (I believe azimuth 0) and the interiors haven't been rotated. This bug carries over into the TSStatic shadow code, but only for sunlight, Lighting Pack light objects in 'Static' mode cast proper shadows.

-John

#16 0, 90, 180, 270 should all be avoided for the sun's heading :) (but 1, 89, 179, and 269 are definitely fine ;))
Althought I'm not sure about 180 and 270, since both 0 and 90 have problems...

#17 All of the peaks and valleys on sin/cos have a problem. Back in the good ole days we added an epsilon value to kill the zeros