I'm going to be using 2 2048x2048 (!!) textures for all of the shadow maps in the city. One will be updated 3 times a second and will cover the entire city, assuring all parts of the city are shadowed. Another will be updated every frame and be focused around the player's view frustum, this will handle the character/vehicle models, and local city shadows. I call these the global and local shadow maps. I blend between them based on the distance from the camera.

I'm not sure if there's a name for this method of shadowing a scene in realtime but it seems to work quite well. There are some tricks and catches that I'm having to work into it...I'll detail all of that tommorow.

The game still runs great :-) The city. which gets drawn twice a frame, is held in static vertex buffers which are only updated when the player moves the camera 15 degrees, or a certain distance, so it's pretty optimized in that sense. Obviously I'm only rendering visible parts of the city to the shadow maps, or parts taht will cast a shadow into the view frustum.

I've got a lot of shaders to write now due to the different combinations of effects and states. I'm going to focus on the skinned model shader tommorow, and add shadow support to it. This will be interesting :-D

The game engine is essentially stripped down, and I'm re-writing almost every aspect of it. All for the better.

I've also FINALLY figured out how to export an animated .x file with vertex weighting out of 3D MAX 7...and succesfully load it into my game. So the character animations/models are now a lot smoother.

I'm tired of working for the day...I'm gonna play Battlefield 2 :-D (they have some pretty cool shadow maps in that game btw.)

Screenshots:
Two small ingame screenshots showing the completly dynamic shadows:






Showing the resolution of "local" shadows on the character/vehicles.


I'll have a better update tommorow, with more progress.

- Dan