Well, DOOM3 had no self shadows, Quake 4 either although the possibility is there. Has there been found a way to make self shadowing work in ET:QW without bugs?
Looking at those screenshots you can clearly see there is self shadowing, but maybe those are “marketing shots”? :lookaround:
I remember Carmack saying one character can’t cast shadow on another - are you sure you mean self-shadowing and not each-other-shadowing ?
Yea, Self shadowing, when an object casts a shadow in itself. Like an arm casting shadow on a leg.
AFAIK player models in DOOM3/Quake 4 had r_sb_noShadows 0 not allowing them to show any shadows on themself. Might be another var, don’t remember the name.
All the r_sb_* CVars dealt with the prototype shadow buffer implementation JC was toying with (and were removed in either v1.2 or 1.3 of D3). What D3/Q4 do is have a material keyword (noselfshadow) that tells that surface not to cast shadows onto itself either for performance or image quality reasons. And because of the way the render order of the world is implemented two materials with this keyword will not cast shadows onto one another.
I’d like to take this opportunity to ask SD that QW allows us to enable selfshadowing in the Advanced Options or even through a CVar (which could perhaps simply tell the engine to ignore the noselfshadow keyword in materials). It was very frustrating looking forward to DOOM 3 seeing those awesome screenshots only to find most models didn’t cast shadows on themselves and no way to enable them except by modding the .MTR and .DEF files. I know it sometimes looks bad as the stencil shadows fall across a round normal mapped surface, however, it also looks bad when you have a character casting a shadow that mysteriously is not present when it happens to fall across a material with the noselfshadows keyword - it can be very distracting.
What I often missin the 1st person shooter is: That when you looks down, you don’t see you feet, but you do see your shadow =p
in ETQW you can simply attach view to head bone when SDK will be out, because unlike ET there will be certainly more quality animations which will not make mess when you do this, however this will have problem with guns/arms, i guess that you will just set higher quality level to current player model and then render no stupid onscreen fixed gun
or you can just add legs in some hacky way ( like to make only them visible to player and so )
in halo you can see legs but with the camer fov and unture perspective it doent realy look all that impresive. i gess having the doom3 inverse kinetics to make the feet look like they are realy standing on the ground rather then just the ET floating player would go some way to help
with this you also need some way to acount for the way the head moves forward when looking down (in front of the chest) and back when looking up (behind the chest) otherwise you would end up looking though the center of you body
in q4 single player there are no shadows since they dont look to ralistic without player model but in multiplayer q4 they are. my gess is that players (unlike AI) could use your shadow to work out you position so if you cant see your own shadow it puts you at a disadvantage
Not more of a disadvantage than the clipping errors in rtcw/et, especially those nice 16-bit clipping errors.
