I'm playing around with the shadows for a while, but one thing I don't see how I could achieve:

I want to have an "isometric" view for my game. Now, that means that view distance is quite fixed, and I rather not have cascaded shadow maps, just one map (I guess I'll save some frames by doing that)

I would rather adjust the "shadow drawing distance" every time I zoom in or out, so I would get the best possible performance/visual compromise.

What I don't get with Esenthels Shadow Map system.... how do I set the range of shadows? It seems fixed, as I only can set D.shdFrac so that only a fraction of the viewport is shadowed..... how is that viewport size computed? I don't think this works for isometric views?

The reason why I don't think it works, every time I set D.shdMapNum to 1, I get only very low-res shadows, so it seems the shadow system defaults to the lowest res shadow-map, that covers the biggest area. I would like to manually resize that area so I would get better quality shadows.

I'm using the deferred renderer...


Thanks for the help

Gian-Reto

in shadow draw function you could also do

Oh that gives me an idea, using fast shadows for object far away then switching to real shadows when in the appropriate range.

Use D.shdFrac, read comments on that function
for example D.shdFrac(0.5f)

D.shdFrac helps.... now the shadow quality is much higher.... yet I still don't understand how the viewport size is measured...

the idea with the fast shadows could be an idea, yet for a night-day-cycle, these fast shadows need some update cycle, so they don't point in the complete wrong direction... they don't need to be updated every frame though, might save some computation time...

The shadow_step Function pointer, how can I understand the comment? Can I tell the Engine with this function how to decide to change from one shadowMap step to the next?

yes, its usage is in ERPG2 sources.