In between work on improved character meshes and the game's combat system - I've been taking some time here and there to add features that the game is starting to suffer from the lack of: distant tree billboards, collisions, and for this week - dynamic shadows.
I haven't personally implemented dynamic shadows myself before, but as someone who likes reading about various graphical algorithms, I was already familiar with the common techniques. I opted for a cascading shadow map approach - although I'm not sure how much of the 'cascading' part I'll have the fillrate for. Sometimes there can be a significant difference between what works in a simple scene vs. what works in a complex scene.
Being someone that likes to learn by 'trying things myself', I think the results worked out pretty good. I'll present the player with a few shadow quality options in the details window so they can adjust the tradeoff between quality and fps hit for themselves - but with a few more performance tweaks, the shadows are certainly a 'keep'.
The difference between the old shots without and the new shots with are night and day - adding some nice visual contrast to the scenes and bringing the animated swaying tree leaves and treetops down into the players line of sight more.
server is down atm. Back tomorrow !