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Among other things, I am working on more file format documentation for X-Plane 10.  Most of the tools you need for scenery are right there in X-Plane 10.0r1, because our art team needed them.

But there is one feature that slid by: a global shadow disable for an object or art asset.  I am adding this directive (it will be called “NO_SHADOW”) to a bunch of places in the scenery system.  Typical use would be to completely exclude geometry from shadowing, which will also improve performance (less work for X-Plane to do).  The directive will be available in 10.05.

There is one exception: you can disable shadowing in an airplane by disabling the “shadow” check box in 10.04, and “glass” tagged objects from v9 planes are not shadowed.

About Ben Supnik

Ben is a software engineer who works on X-Plane; he spends most of his days drinking coffee and swearing at the computer -- sometimes at the same time.

9 comments on “No Shadows For You!”

  1. Given the attention to shadows brings up a thought, Ben: will the 3D shadows on aircraft ever get higher resolution than they have now? There’s still a nasty sawtooth on ’em when you get close or the angle on the aircraft “stretches” the edge of the shadow.

  3. Mmm, yes this made me think perhaps the shadows could be blurred a bit more to prevent the sawtooth. Nasty flickering from helicopter blades is also a little bit epileptic. There are so many *large scale world* games that seem to get the shadows just right, and it saddens me that x-plane hasn’t yet. Good to here there is more room to tune 😉

    1. Then we’d just be complaining a bout the great big blurry shadows.

      (re: my post above) Tuning is one thing, but I sense a hint in the background that resolution is also going to be a memory issue, and this is one area where resolution is, for now, dispensable. It just impacts those of us making video in X-Plane — unless you see lots of aircraft shadow from the cockpit.

  4. Hey Ben, I just did an alert on the new Nvidia Kepler GPU coming out soon and specs. Can you let us know if it might boost performance considerably? It looks twice the speed/fps performance of my 560. Plus would teaming it with a PCIe 3.0 compatible Mobo make things even snazzier? Finally, Chip keeps bugging me ‘why doesn’t the new card have 3, 4 or 5 gigs of memory?’! I’m guessing as it can pass on more info quicker, it doesn’t need the memory?

    Loving the new RC3.

    1. Dunno how much faster Kepler will be, except that you can definitely be CPU bound on a modern system – I see that on my i5/580 sometimes, and in that case, Kepler won’t be any help.

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