Nice, but the buildings seems to be "floating" on top of the terrain instead of "being" there if you know what I mean. Second, the shadow on that girl in the second screen seems to be a little bit out of place, but I guess you already know that [smile].

Daaaaaamn! Still having shadow problem I see [wink].

The dark sand, looks a little weird because its so much darker then the other sand, and on my screen it looks almost black.

I would have to agree the building seems to float, I think this has to do with 2 things

1) You have dark sand around the building so on my screen it looks like it floating on a black hole.

2) The buildings textures seem to be solid colors where the ground is a texture. I think the buildings and the trees seem to match but the ground almost seems too detailed.

I like the Eye Logo and the Hand Logo, but the lips look a little weird, I think they work but only because they are pair next to the others. On its own I don't know if I would know what it is.

Finally, if it didn't say that you had selected a sand castle I don't think anyone would know. I know the player will probably know what they tried to click on, but maybe the menu could show just above the item your doing the action to, so that you can still see it.

Overall its extremely impressive, its very clear that you've progressed from Mornings Wrath.

The buildings now look weird. The buildings themselves cast shadows, but nothing in them does. The benches, for example, don't cast shadows. The glass is perfectly clear, etc.

IMHO, shadows everywhere or nowhere. If you do it halfway, it just looks weird.

>>samsonite
yup, i need to add fringes or somthing to them, im exceptionally bad at making that look right, too. =/

shadows in general are posing problems, so im thinking i might drop them.


>>john hattan on shadows

Hmm, funny I don't seem to notice things like that.

though when you put it that way it makes me want to drop shadows all together (they are posing to be a problem and have already imposed some rather tight restrictions on the engine =/)

will need to give that some thought, but I know for a fact i cant have shadows in the building themselvs, the renderer i'm using wont do it =/

I think you should trty to keep the shadows. In Morning's Wrath the one thing that kept getting me was the fact that Morning sort of seemed to be floating on thin air, since there was little to show me that she's actally standing on the ground. A shadow creates a link from the character to the ground: if you're on the ground, the shadow matches up to your feet.

I love reading posts from people regarding issues that are not solid yet. It makes me warm and fuzzy.

Goodjob Raymond. T minus 26 days! ;)

EDI: Can't you use some other software ? I think shadows are just to essential to drop them off.., what software are you using to make those buildings ?

Hey, looking good! I like the water!

Same recommendations as everyone else as far as the shadows are concerned. Can you expand on the reason why it won't work with your renderer? I would love to hear the issue.

Keep up the good work!

Presuming that your buildings are bitmaps, couldn't you just pre-render the shadows?

the renderering software we are using doesn't render shadows, so, no =/

Can't you just change the rendering software ??

My vote, dump the shadows. Even if you did render 'em, it wouldn't fix problems like the palm tree's shadow being cast on the ground, but not the building.

Without shadows it will look weird., thats a easy fix, never place trees in places that the shadow would overlap in a building., or if it does, they can allways paint it on top of the building bitmap.

Well, to me, shadows are probably at the low end of my priorities when playing a game. If it's fun to play, who needs shadows?

EDI, how are you making the shadows? Are they not the original sprite, blended, blackened, rotated and skewed? Why not simply draw each shadow at the same time as its parent object? As in during the same run.

What I mean is you have sorting done so images are placed based on their y value, creating the illusion of depth. Since this is so, drawing the object and its shadow at the same time should have the tree cast a shadow on ontop of the building.