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Cannot find 'headless dynamic shadows' bug in TGEA 1.01

by Sim Ops Studios (#0003) · in Torque Game Engine Advanced · 09/10/2007 (9:24 am) · 6 replies

Hello all!

I'm sorry to post about something that has already been covered, but I can no longer find the forum post relating to our issue.

We are still experiencing the bug in TGEA 1.01 that clips the top of the player's shadow (so our model's shadow is headless). I believe this bug was fixed in TGEA 1.02:

- eliminated dynamic lighting edge clamp artifacts

Does anyone have more information on this bug? I remember a forum post related to it, but I cannot find that post now. We don't quite have the time to invest in a full upgrade to TGEA 1.02, so I was hoping to pull this specific fix into our build of 1.01. If anyone knows either which forum post addressed this issue or which objects were changed to squash this bug, it would be very helpful!
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Torque Owner asmaloney (Andy)
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#1
09/10/2007 (9:41 am)
Take a look at the changes in engine/lightingSystem/sgLighting.h and engine/lightingSystem/sgLightingModel.cc -- that's where it was fixed.

[Edit: it == eliminated dynamic lighting edge clamp artifacts]
[Edit 2: get the .cc file name correct]

Associate Ross Pawley
#2
09/10/2007 (9:42 am)
The dynamic light clamping bug is unrelated to the shadow bug you're experiencing. It was to do with volume lights not generating a "clean" set of values for the edges of the mask used to render the light, which would then get clamped and stretched over whatever surface it was on.

Sim Ops Studios (#0003)
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#3
09/10/2007 (9:46 am)
Thank you for the quick response!

asmaloney: I'm able to find the .h file, but no corresponding .cc file for sgLighting. Is it another file in the lighting system perhaps?

We're still hammering on this issue; any further input would be much appreciated.

Torque Owner asmaloney (Andy)
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#4
09/10/2007 (9:56 am)
Fixed in comment above...

Associate Ross Pawley
#5
09/10/2007 (11:24 am)
Looking in the sgLighting files is probably going to be a dead end I'd think. I believe the shadow stuff is done elsewhere(could be wrong about that though, I only looked at those files in regards to that clamping volume light bug). One thing you may look at is the debug rendering of bounding boxes. I think that if your character's head is outside the bounding box, it might clip off the shadow. You can enable that in a debug build by doing $gamebase::debugboundingbox = 1 on the console.

Sim Ops Studios (#0003)
Default Studio Name
#6
09/10/2007 (1:40 pm)
Interesting! Thanks to all of you for steering me in the right direction.

We've looked into the bounding box issue, and the model's head definitely extends outside the selection box we get in the level editor. What is strange is that the original model in Maya shows the bounding box in the correct position; perhaps we're having issues with our maya2dts export tool. In the meantime, I've been able to fix the problem by overriding the bounding box information by setting the 'boundingBox' property in the PlayerData datablock.

Thank you for all your help!