Hello everybody. Some weeks ago (I don't remeber in which thread) we talked about
stencil shadows, and someone (maybe fromhell?) told me that they were disabled in OpenArena cause of its models have more polygons than the original Q3 ones, but that maybe they could be enabled again, since they aren't really heavy for the hardware.
Well, I'd like to go deeper inside the situation and then, I hope, to have you guys re-enable them for the next release.
Recap: if you read
DO NOT LINK[/b]) h t t p s : / / openarena . wikia . com/wiki/FAQ#The_game_isn.27t_as_pretty_as_the_screenshots_:.28]here, it is told that one can enable them with \cg_shadows 2 and \r_stencilbits 8.
If you launch OpenArena 0.8.5, enter a match and set cg_shadows different from 0 (no shadow under characters) or 1 (simple circular shadows under characters), that value will be reverted to 1.
I tried with some old Q3A mod under OpenArena, like
DO NOT LINK[/b]) h t t p s : / / openarena . wikia . com/wiki/ModCompat/Alternate_Fire]AlternateFire, and there is a way to see stencil shadows
there, using cg_shadows 3, it seems independently from what I set for r_stencilbits. You can see that in the screenshot. I read
here (but I don't know how much that page, about
Q3A console, is accurate) that "2 = stencil buffered 3 = simple stencil buffered (if r_stencilebits is not=0)". I don't know what to think exactly.
So, there are some questions:
- What is \r_stencilbits, exactly? What's the best value?
- What's the difference between cg_shadows 2 and 3?
- Is is possible to re-enable stencil shadows in OpenArena?
I know that they are not perfect, but they don't seem to slow down so much; they could be nice when adding screenshot on the site; if one experiences many slowdowns in his old computer, he can disable them like he would do with bloom or asinotrphic filter; if we want to mantain a polygon limit, we could simply make it higher.
UPDATE: I tried cg_shadows directly in Q3A 1.32c... cg_shadows 3 works, cg_shadows 2 does not work for me (no shadow is shown, but, unlike OA, it does not revert to 1).
UPDATE 2: Strange... once cg_shadows 3 has worked under OA (enabled shadows, altough they were drawn for some characters and not for others -I suppose cause of the famous polygon limit). I exited from OA, tried again... and it does not work anymore... now is shifts automatically to 1. I can't figure why...
UPDATE 3: About what I told in "update 2"... it seems that if I load a map from "Single player" menu, cg_shadows 3 works... if I load a map from \map command, cg_shadows 3 is inhibited... Somebody can tell me why?