Next question about nukes: Have you checked out the new effect in the PTE build?

Actually, I didn't realize I was on his account. I was on our casting machine and just posted a reply. And I didn't troll his account because that just starts a war where everybody loses.

I didn't mean it literally, I was joking!

Haha....pretty crazy...and only 46 mins to setup this time. I like how the color of the entire moon is changed due to the scarring from the explosions! It goes from a light gray to a dark charcoal grey.....pretty funny!

And on topic....

Overall I love the new effect, but I would say that the rolling smoke effect of the mushroom cloud goes on for much too long.

The one thing I always wanted from the KS video was the blurryness. Soft shadows, awesome AA and a little bit of DoF. If that was in PA, it would really feel a like that video, graphics wise.

You just said that you can't do soft shadows.. that makes me sad Why? Is it far too slow to be worth implementing?

Realtime soft shadows are an unsolved problem with modern 3d rasterizing graphics. The only time they are done is when they are prebaked or simply faked in a specific context.

Technically SSAO is a form of soft shadowing for diffuse light, so there is that.

Just wondering, is the planet smash explosion going to get a similar treatment to the nuke explosions, possibly soon™? Because if so, that would be awesome.

Heh, I don't quite get that But I'm interested in understanding this.

With faked/prebaked you mean that the shadows are pre-made, not simulated, and have pre-made animations on them?

SSAO works because those shadows are fake and always in the same spot (not affected by directional light from the sun)?

Let me think this through... hard shadows are projected on a pixelated raster, resolution affects how much you can see those pixels, with other words the quality.

Soft shadows aren't projected on a raster and.... ?

(edit: I looked this up and found a unity tutorial explaining it)

I'm currently making a game with Unity, the free version doesn't have soft shadows... so I don't have any experience with them.

There are a number of cheats and hacks to do shadows, but they're all cheats and hacks. Most of them do involve rendering the scene or each object from the point of view of the light and projecting that onto the surface.

The way we do shadows isn't exactly hard, but it's not really soft. The light renders the entire scene into a depth map, then when rendering the light it does a lookup in light space to see if the pixel it's rendering is behind something that's in the light's depth texture. OpenGL helps by doing some interpolation when doing shadow depth checks, effectively doing bilinear sampling of the binary "in shadow" value so it's not just on or off.

Now if you blur the depth map all you get is weirdly shaped still hard shadows, because you're not blurring an outline, your blurring the shape of the shadow depth. Shadows get bigger in the distance and smaller or disappear closer to the object casting them.

Now what many games do is blur the results or do multiple samples of the shadow map offset from each other. Unity does multiple samples, basically at each point it does the binary shadow check from n number of locations offset at a random point within a range from the actual position and average these together. This means shadows are blurred by a constant amount irrelevant of the distance to the shadow caster or the size of the light casting the shadow. This gets expensive, and edges end up looking fairly noisy.

A more accurate, but often worse looking method is to just render multiple shadows based on the size of the light. This gets accurate spread on shadows, but is even more expensive and can very easily just look like multiple lights casting hards shadows instead of one light casting a soft shadow. This is what pre-rendering systems often do, because for them they can just render 1000 shadows for a single light and it'll look fairly soft.

Then there are a couple of methods that use two depth maps that are slightly different and blur them to find a best guess for the shadow falloff. This looks and works great and isn't that expensive, but fails really badly if there are multiple shadow casting objects in a row, which is always the case in PA.


The most accurate way is to simply do ray tracing / path tracing and just shoot out a few million traces and see where they land. This is another technique popular in non-realtime applications, but it'll be a while before this is plausible to do in real time at acceptable quality.


Also I should point out my original mention of soft shadows was in reference to shadows from semitransparent objects, like smoke. The common way to do this is to render out transparent objects into another texture with just their silhouettes and projecting this into the scene. The problem with this is you have no information about the depth where the shadow starts, just the final shape of the shadow. So you have to do guess work hacks so shadows from smoke don't project on objects in front of the smoke. Some games do a projection for each individual shadowing particle from the location of the particle (Battlefield 4 and Infamous: Second Son both do this), but that gets expensive very quickly.

Thank you. My knowledge of shadows has successfully leveled up.

I totally agree that the new nuke is awesome, but if I built hundreds or thousands of nukes, how could I achieve the coordinated strike shown in the video? Is there a nuke carpet bomb mod or something?

Blargh!

Area attack (select attack then click and drag) with the nukes selected.

Awesome...that's good to know!

We have a function to automatically fire an unlimited number of nukes with a single klick. This game is amazing.

And damn, they look so good. Definitly belongs to the coolest nukes i've seen in a game. And those aren't even the real game enders in PA.

Is there a way to launch a whole bunch of nukes at several areas at the same time? It seems if I select all my nuke sites, then click attack all readied nukes go there instead of just 1. So if I wanted to carpet bomb an area, how might I accomplish this? Is there a "next nuclear Missile site" button?

An Area attack command will do that for ya.