Gunspire graphic bug (shadow problem)

[Artighel]

Hi, on BZ2 1.3 I have noticed a problem with GS rendering when Shadow is set to HIGH in the Graphic Options. Dark faces appear near the GS. When selecting NONE or LOW Shadow setting, problem doesn't appear anymore.

Graphic configuration : DirectX 9.0b + ATI RADEON 9800 128 Mo

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[Artighel]

(hoping link is working now   )

[technoid]

I believe this stencil shadow effect bug was never fix or totally fixed in 1.3.  Just a guess.  Couldn't find anything in the changelog.

[GreenHeart]

i just copied & pasted the url.

If you zoom on that screenshot you will notice that their is a unit behind the lung. that Unit behind the lung is source of the light.
Healer\Service Trucks have a bad habit of running into things when they drive to fast...

[Avatar]

Medium shadows look pretty good now, and don't seem to drag you down as much as high shadows, which still have holes and such.

Shadows are very tough to render properly, as are reflections.  There's usually some 'cheating' involved to lower the rendering costs.  Sometimes this cheating produces bad results...

-Av-

[Dirty Rooster]

Healers love to go INSIDE spires and stay there...

[Red Devil]

Maybe they're not so dumb after all...

Hey, you can go into render.cfg in the BZ root directory and turn off StencilShadows:

[Render]
// Stencil shadows create very detailed shadows at run time.  Only some video cards
// support stencil buffers, and it does come with some performance costs.
// Change the 1 to a 0 in order to disable stencil buffers (overrides menu selection)
Stencil = 0

[Avatar]

Healers love to go INSIDE spires and stay there...

Yeah, well, when all you have is that blue beam you tend to be a little timid...  

"Stand back or I'll HEAL you..."

hehe

-Av-

[Artighel]

So is this shadow diplay issues will be taken in consideration ? Or have we all to play with the shadow setting set to LOW ?

[Spacecomber]

This problem is known and has been present with 1.2.  Unfortunately, it looks like correcting things like this (and Bump Mapping and making T & L hardware supported) gets into re-writing the entire graphics code for  the game, and it was decided that this was beyond what a couple of programmers were willing to take on in their spare time.  Yes, DirectX9 graphics code for the game might be nice, but how many years would you like to wait for it (assuming someone with the source code was willing to do this for "fun")?

The Audio code was re-written, but the graphics code is still DirectX6 era code, so some of these advanced features are bit out of synch with where video card standards are today.

At least that's my take on it.

[OvermindDL1]

The current stencil shadows in BZ2 (any version) are from an old era and were not finished in programming, there are problems if shadows go through things, there are problems with other things as well, I am not sure but I do not think it uses the Depth Fail method when inside the shadow, would have to check again, but in the mean time, set shadows to medium or lower and all will work well.