Redneckerz wrote:I support the low-end cause given my rig is equally crappy and probably worse than yours, so i love ideas like this.
I am sure you are aware of Nash's
SpriteShadow thing that does something eerily similar, right?
Yeah, I am. Never been a big fan of the effect however, and anyways i only ever tried it very, very few times, requiring at least LZDoom while I use ZDoom32 and Zandronum the most. (LZDoom is 2slow4me!)
I don't think your rig is worse or equal to mine, tho, you got an Nvidia GPU (I got this awful Intel Baytrail thingy that has GL 4.0 but at a horrible performance), and probably a CPU not meant for power-saving laptops (Rockin' a Celeron 1.4GHz here

)
Redneckerz wrote:Perhaps Marisa can help you out with this part? Its worth a try! But i can imagine a custom build is equally enticing for mods (Or Zandronum, haha)

Actually, about the custom build thing... I got an idea for a zandronum.pk3 hack that may do the job, gimme 30 minutes and let's see if I can get anything out of it!
I guess I'll ask him/her if I can't manage to get the hack working, prolly a good idea.
Redneckerz wrote:Something more related to this - It is stated that this is pure Decorate and ACS, no shaders, and runs on ZDoom aswell - So basically it can run without any hardware acceleration. What's the performance penalty really with these shadows (Which i assume, like the original revolve around a Shadowbrain actor)?
I tried my best to simplify it as much as possible, and I stripped down the system to just 2 actors: ShadowTarget and ShadowActor. Since there's only one shadow, there's no need for a ShadowBrain anymore, and all possible targets are added up to an array which is then accessed by the ShadowActor to know which one of the ShadowTargets are the closest, and then proceed to face it and do the size/alpha calculations relative to it's distance.
With that in mind, the performance penalty is very small. In all vanilla maps I'm usually getting a solid 60fps at 1280x720, as opposed to GShadow Beta 2, which would easily dip down into the 10's even in very simple maps. I haven't done any real benchmarks nor any real testing beyond IWAD or Vanilla-compat maps, but given all tests have had very successful results in terms of performance, I'm plenty sure most maps will run fine on most computers.
Redneckerz wrote:You have me at normal mapping support

Kidding, i am just saying, i love your works and your dedication to the low end userbase, and putting mileage out of older builds - Like with your QEffectsGL port to Zandro, if i recall.
Never really ported QEffectsGL to Zandro, I have nearly zero programming experience unless you were to count ZDoom and SRB2 scripting, which probably doesn't really count, It was just a config file I posted that made the errors look less... terribly obvious! There won't be any normal mapping support, heh, but do expect something fairly similar to specular maps, and "ghetto parallax mapping"
