Feature:Sprite Shadows
From Post-Apocalyptic RPG wiki
This article documents a requested feature of medium priority
The features or design guidelines described in this article are only a proposal made by one or some persons. It may not have been reviewed and ratified by the core development team yet.
This item has been marked as medium priority, meaning it would be welcome, but is not crucial. There might be more urgent things to attend to.
This article documents a requested feature that requires alterations to FIFE
The features or design guidelines described in this article are only a proposal made by one or some persons. It may not have been reviewed and ratified by the core development team yet.
This item has been marked as requiring alterations to FIFE, meaning it may require a knowledge of C++.
Sprite shadows
A separate sprite is used to define fake shadows. It is created from the source 3d model of the sprite, but as a separate image. The image is binary, where it is black there is no shadow, where it is some other colour, there is shadow. This shadow is rendered as grey transparent "something" in-game. See screenshot for examples of this method: http://www.cheats.ru/uploaded/d/diablo2-01145.jpg
The tree and the characters are casting shadows. Other objects and terrain, do not get occluded by this shadow but only affected.
Another example: http://www.gamershell.com/static/screenshots/2727/42570_full.jpg. The tower in the middle of the screen is casting a shadow. Two men are in the shadow. Terrain sprites are affected, while the unit sprites are not. FIFE should perhaps follow the same principle. There is a need to define the drawing order of the shadows, due to the way the affect certain thnigs and don't affect some other.
A sprite object would then look like this: http://img149.imageshack.us/img149/9181/objectus5.png
While its "shadow" sprite would look like this: http://img266.imageshack.us/img266/8832/shadowpf6.png
If the object's shadow is a part of the sprite, the end result will look weird, due to the special drawing position the shadows have in the rendering hierarchy. At least two major games (red alert 2 and AoE2 went with this approach)