Finally, Ember has complete real time shadows. It took some time, and it wasn't until Alexey some months ago dove into it that we finally got a working implementation. But not only did he add shadows to the world, he also added a complete graphics level framework, where Ember will itself detect the kind of graphics card the user has and tune the graphics accordingly. This means that if you have low end card you'll still be able to run the client at playable frame rates, while if you have a newer card you'll also get real time shadows and other nice effects. One of the reasons we couldn't do this before was that it wasn't until Ogre 1.6 that we got easy access to the techniques needed to do shadows on the larger scale that our world presents (it's a bit harder to do outdoor shadows than shadows in an enclosed space).Alexey did most of the work, and I got in at the end and fixed some issues with how the shadow system differentiated between semi-transparent and opaque materials. It turned out that Ogre doesn't have functionality where you can specify a template shadow material per technique (for example one shadow material for the "High" technique and another one for the "Medium" technique) and then have Ogre automatically supply all of the material settings from the regular material (alpha settings, textures to use, etc.). It can do that if you specify a scene manager general shadow material, but if you specify a shadow material per technique it expects you to provide all of the information needed in that material. Given the amount of materials we use that's not a viable solution; it's much more easier if we used a material template which would for each shadow pass get the correct data set. Thanks to the modular design of Ogre this wasn't hard to do, as can be seen in this commit. The result is both working shadows and a material setup that's both simple and flexible.
I've also put some work into improving the way the minimap for the compass is rendered. Previously it used the same lightning as the regular world, which mean that it was completely dark during the night. That's been fixed now, so it's always rendering it with a nice midday light. I also made it use a simpler material. This fixes some stuttering which presented itself when you moved rapidly through the world, as well as fixed the issue with ugly shadows appearing on the minimap.
A demonstration of the correct shadows, the runtime graphical settings changes and the new minimap lightning is shown here.
And a higher quality version is to be found here.
