Remove shadows underwater

[Jools]

I would prefer to not have submerged units cast shadow on sea bed. It looks silly. It would probably increase fps too.

Water prevents you from seeing the terrain structure underwater, so it would be only logical to not see shadow either. And IRL shadows in water are visible only when water depth is very shallow, like under 1 m (or if the water is very clear).

[Anarchid]

Water prevents you from seeing the terrain structure underwater

what?

[Jools]

Yeah, if you have an underwater volcano for instance. It would not be seen from above water surface.

[Anarchid]

Unsure what kind of water settings you are on.

I can see the texture on the sea bottom, and any terrain on it, including terraformed underwater walls in zk.

Terrain visibility obeys same rules as units as far as i can see.

[Jools]

I guess you are right. I tested on Cold place, which doesn't have many underwater terrain features. I guess you have to be able to see your units that are underwater to control them.

Still, I think it would be better if underwater units would not have shadow (as IRL) and that aircraft's shadows would be cast on water surface instead of on seabed.

[Anarchid]

underwater units would not have shadow (as IRL)

Unsure what kind of IRL settings you are on. In my IRL i can see shadows of underwater units.

[Kloot]

http://imgur.com/HsJX80K

Also, not going to happen.

[Jools]

What altitude is that picture taken on? What altitude (zoomlevel) do people usually play on?

You are confusing scales...

[Beherith]

The perfomance gains of this would be pretty much negligible. Also, I like undersea shadows.

Also jool, look at the map Rage_v1 http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.ph ... hilit=rage

[Jools]

Yes, on those altitudes, if a plane flies over water, I think the shadow should be cast on water surface. Anyway, I still appreciate that at least some people can discuss the matter as civilised persons.

[Kloot]

You are confusing scales...

Protip: don't try to use the "realistic scale" argument, you will fail.

And IRL shadows in water are visible only when water depth is very shallow

"IRL", you can not only not see the shadows, but also not the object itself if it is in deep enough water. So let's make the engine skip rendering of underwater objects altogether for the sake of realism! Oh, but wait:

I guess you have to be able to see your units that are underwater to control them.

We must deviate from reality on one point for gameplay reasons, but because YOU think something looks silly we may not deviate on another?

[luckywaldo7]

Unsure what kind of water settings you are on.

I think he specifically wants to recreate the appearance of water that has been polluted by dirty humans.

[Anarchid]

There is a potentially winning argument for realtime photon mapping, or at least subsurface scattering.
It doesn't include any performance boosts, though.

On a technical note, using custom shaders, you can already disable shadows for your units, game-side. See how cloaked units don't cast shadows, etc.

I think he specifically wants to recreate the appearance of water that has been polluted by dirty humans.

Bumpwater can be tuned to do that. I know, i made a map with rivers of b͖̟̲̯̝̰̯loo̪̙̠d̫̲̪ (but never released because was not satisfactory).

[Beherith]

Yeah I think we should discard the current rendering pipeline and go for a full raytraced forward renderer. Should look loads better, and we will finally find a use for all those idle cpu cores! Also, we could then just use the GPU to do the sim calculations! </sarcasm>

[Jools]

Yes, or people who don't like shadows can disable them completely.

However, is it not possible to make shadows appear on water surface instead on sea bottom in any way? For people who don't like silly things?

[Anarchid]

For people who don't like silly things?

Silly things like transparent water?

You can still custom-shader that. Or use blob shadows for aircraft, and cause them to snap to water. Blob shadows are more realistic anyway, because they emulate dispersion of light in air (standard shadows are unrealistic and sharp; air isn't perfectly transparent either).

Also, blob shadows are cheaper.

You probably can even cast both types of shadows (on water and under water) if you really want to strain what's possible in 95.0, too.

[Jools]

That's true, but the best solution (as suggested in this thread) is still to disable shadows completely.

[Beherith]

Actually the reason shadows turn to blobs at longer distances is because the sun is not a point light source, and not air dispersion.

[Jools]

That's interesting. Here are some counter images, since you all seem to be convinced the emperor has clothes:







Yeah, that's the shadow on sea bed. An aircraft carrier goes on water that's about 10 m deep (sarcasm)

The difference to the other images is of course scale, but if that word is somehow painful, we can use others instead. How about gamut, spectrum, perspective?

It is actually interesting to compare those pictures. If you instead go to a very high altitude, you can indeed see a lot of things underwater. Like here from google maps:

[knorke]

Question is what scale is relevant for spring.
In my mind everything is at cute miniature toy scale and would want to see all the effects water and shadows have at this scale.
For example acting as lense when deformed, as by the feet of this gentleman:

or ripples here:
http://www.deneki.com/wp-content/upload ... adow-1.jpg

Imo in picture of red rubber boat that is not the shadow but a reflection. This video explains the difference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHqNwZsZEX0
Similiar to:

(notice the yellow thing)