Comments on: The Future of Triangles Part 2: X-Plane 8

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 06:42:00 +0000

Some kind of shadows on objects would be very cool and I’m rather thinking of cockpits than entire planes, although the latter would be nice too. Currently, it’s very hard to get the light correct in a 3D pit where there are huge areas that never get any sun (panels under glareshields, pedals and legroom etc…) and yet every surface is lit up like the fuselage was transparent.

By: Benjamin Supnik

Benjamin Supnik — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 12:31:00 +0000

Kaminari,

Stenciled shadows are immensely problematic for flight simulators. I will comment on this in more detail in a future blog post when I round up all of the technologies that have been tossed around in comments. I will only say now that we probably could have some kind of shadows on JUST the user’s plane, and that shadowing for a wider variety is very, very difficult. Most shadowing techniques that work well in a FPS don’t work in x-plane because our world is 300×200 km and theirs is less than 1×1 km at a time.

By: Ryusennin

Ryusennin — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 12:21:00 +0000

Looks like there’s some ongoing work on complex lighting for XP9. Sounds good to me.

But does that cover projected shadows as well? Really, this is long overdue. I was perusing through MobyGames today and stumbled upon a screenshot of Flanker (1995) which made me silently cry out of despair and humiliation.

http://mobygames.com/game/dos/su-27-flanker/screenshots/gameShotId,243171/

That’s the terrible truth. We’re in late 2008 and XP is still incapable of stencil shadows. The old shadow map looks terribly obsolete (and it’s not even properly scaled/projected).