Re: [Adonthell-devel] Shadow is back ... sort of

[Kai Sterker]

On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 8:28 PM, James Nash <address@hidden> wrote:

> What happens if the shadow covers surfaces with different heights? E.g. if
> the character is walking up some stairs. Ideally the shadow will be split
> and the portion covering each flat surface will be drawn with the
> appropriate offset. However, I'm guessing that might be tricky to implement.

I guess it might be reasonably simple to do that based on object
bounding boxes, which should work for most ground tiles and things
like stairs. It would be nice to have, though, because now the shadow
looks a bit like it's floating in the air when walking up the stairs,
for example. Same near the edge of a cliff.

> Also, can we have shadows shrink if the character is higher above the
> ground? Alternatively, we could just fade the shadow (i.e. make it more
> transparent). I'm thinking if the character is on the ground the shadow
> beneath him/her has maximum size / opacity and if they jump upward the
> shadow either contracts or fades. That would give players some clues as to
> how far above things they are when jumping around.

Nice idea :-). Since we know the character's height above ground, we
can pretty easily change alpha based on that. Changing size would be a
bit more tricky, although for a simple shadow a very simple scaling
routine would work out, I'd assume.


> While agree that object shadows are important for the map-editor I think the
> requirements may differ compared to what we'd want for characters in game:
>
> - They should provide an accurate shadow / outline of the area an object
> being moved around will occupy on the ground to help map designers to place
> them correctly.
> - I think you wouldn't want any shrinking/fading if objects move further up
> since that would make object placement more difficult for map designers

I agree. The map editor will have different requirements than the game
itself, especially with something like the above implemented.

I like those ideas, so I'll see what can be done :-).

Kai