You could draw the part of the image under the building on the part of the building image directly above it(if you could easily find that part of the image)

EDIT: Or if you plan for the tree to stay there forever, you could just add the shadow to the building sprite, or if you plan for the building to be used elsewhere, just make a copy of it.

I think the grass makes things look a little more connected to the ground, but its very uniformly placed, and it looks a little odd that you have grass growing in a very thin line around everything, but no grass anywhere else.

The owners of this beach happens to love grass around their tenants buildings.... *cough* =)

*character strolls on by a building*
*character notices their own shadow under building*....

These shadows are definitely going to cause some headaches.

hmm, two thoughts...

1. Even if you get that shadow to apply to the building with the correct mapping it'll be over the glass window. Solid shadow + Glass window = Not pretty. Sure, solves one problem but introduces a (potentially lesser) problem as well.

2. Load-time or pre-processing step. How dynamic is your world? Could you pre-process a 1-bit shadow mask? A simple ray-tracer wouldn't be hard to knock-up and it'd probably solve some of your shadow related problems.

Jack

solution 1: good point, though considerably lesser i'd say

solution 2: the buildings are images so there is no way to know what is a window and what ins't, and im not interested in pre-processing it anyway =)

Move the tree. It's an easy fix. Yeah, it's a cheap trick, but it's nothing that hasn't been done before.

Still, it looks weird that the buildings have no internal shadows. I'm still jockying for eliminating shadows entirely. It's just gonna be a can of worms trying to make shadows that look even remotely realistic in what is ostensibly a 2D game.

Quote:Move the tree. It's an easy fix.

Even if he moves the trees and keeps things out of the way of other objects, how do you keep the character shadow out from under the objects?

I don't think an easy fix is a solution to this problem if you want shadows to resemble a truely immersive feeling.

Shadows really add a great flavor to a game and eliminating them will be a minor issue that could be made up by GREAT gameplay. Just remember that there are great examples of games that didn't use shadows that turned out great.

Remove the shadows completely and insert blobs. stylefull blobs?