Would be nice if objects (ships, asteroids) projected shadows with the nearest sun as a light source, would give a nice sense of realism. As an option you could select for roids not to project and to limit it to the station and ships.

Right now eye candy things, such as this, do not have a high priority, the developers are mostly working on the game things like the interface and NPC intelligence.

When DOES eye candy factor into the equation? I still don't understand why you can't do both. Make the game function and look good at the same time. Hire an intern out of college looking to work up a portfolio or something, hire per project independent contractors, etc. IT CAN BE DONE!!

To get shadows you need solid object occlusion, which also means RADAR SHADOWS!! Heck yes!

Johnhawl, hiring implies money, something which the devs don't have much of. Hiring also means you have to take time to show people what does what and how you do things. Time and money, both are very valuable resources.

Keep in mind, too, that the heart of Vendetta is a custom-built game engine designed by Guild Software. Anyone coming in to work on it would need to be mentored by one of the devs, which takes up time.

Taking the time to demo and explain to somebody drops the mentor's own productivity down to less than 50% in many industries. If the orientee is going to be staying on, then the time investment is worth it.

Once the tools are made to automate many of the things the devs are doing by hand, there will be more time to devote to tuning and beautification. Eye-candy IS important, but perhaps not the most important at the moment.

Interns are not payed. Sure you take a little time up front to show them around, but then in the end you have two more hands working on it so your production time decreases due to more workers. If the plan is to go main stream then they're going to need more people sooner or later, why not now? New employees are like the new Delivorator, takes a little time in the begining but in the end it's worth it.

Yea how are you guys so stupid?
John you covered it.

Interestingly, we already have a version of this. Find a nice white bone roid field and approach from sun side; having passed through, swing about and head back the other way. Note shadows on one (dark) side of the roids, light on the other. Clearly, some sort of solid object occlusion is already present... not sure if radar could be tied to the same code that generate the sun's light rays...

That's a static lightmap. IE: The light source is static. There's 2 problems with static light maps that cause them to look ugly:

1) Light sources must not move
2) Objects do not self-shadow

Incarnate and I had a conversation about this once. Basically, OpenGL only inherently supports 15 concurrent light-sources (making dynamic headlights or the like difficult). Now that VO supports programmable pixel & vertex shaders, it would be possible to add support for dynamic lighting. However, it'd require large amounts of time, especially to maintain OpenGL + DirectX usability.

Ah.

Hi,

I do not understand why do you need shadows. Their only effect is that a ship can turn optically invisible.

Do not forget that your ship is equipped with a highly sophisticated board computer. It draws the invisible ships on most probable position according radar signals and trajektory calculations. :D

Regards,

Darkwood

PS: I would like to be able to switch to a strategy display where all objects are wireframed but the probable trajectories are drawn (not only the target prediction)

Just to further this post because I'm always interested in eye-candy, and the math that goes behind it... here's what I think about the whole shadows issue:

- Vertex-projected shadows would not work in VO.
Why? Because we have sectors close to stars and the star is in no way a 'point' light source when it takes up half your screen.

- So, use texture-based/shader shadows.
Area light sources are difficult and time-consuming to calculate because you need to calcuate the umbra (fully occluded part of the shadow), and the penumbra (gradient soft shadow around it). Programmable shaders do have the ability to work here, however we leave out the OpenGL folks until 2.0 and GL Shading are widespread and adopted. Unfortunately, the shader would have to be calculated at sector load, and applied and casted from every object in the system... I'm actually quite curious to see how my card would handle that... 500 roids, a handful of ships, all casting darkness onto one another. One can only hope :)

- T.K.

I'm gonna need a new computer, then, with a 512MB or 1GB Graphics card.

Come ooooonnnn, LOTTERY!

Shadows wouldn't be quite as nice as the possibility of light (the two go together). As in headlights. As in things like that. And I'm pretty sure that they could manage sun-like illumination using pixel and vertex shaders.