
I know this may seen simple but I got soft shadows to work after I put 3 lights up withing close proximity. Turn shadows alpha down to 25 and they look really good. I mean really good. Big problem with the player though. Pawns and player avitar have nasty artifacts all over them.
I thought of a possible fix for that though and a way to make things like this a little more usable without killing the frame rate. (The soft shadow s I am using are on Virgil and I cant use them on a pawn with a decent polycount or it kills the FPS) The artifacts can be taken away just with offsetting the shadow origin by eve a tiny bit I think.
What if the engine diddn't use the actual player avitar or pawn for the shadows? Then they could be foffset enough to avoide nasty artifacts and you could build a really low poly modlel for the shadow casting, wile keeping your nice high end actor for looks. It could be implemented in the pawn/character.ini file
stencilshadows = true
Shadow actor = lame shadow guy.act
I mean a shadow guy could use 1/4 the polys of even virgil and still work well enough. maybe even less. as long as the animations are the same it should work well shouldn't it?
BTW I finalyy got these shadows working today.
For all you out there new to RF let me save you some real trouble.
to get stencle shadows to work you must...
1. Check the new characterini to make sure your startup character has them set to true. This file overrides what you set in playersetup. If your having trouble and no answer is in site try that.
2. Do the same for all pawns that use them. (pawn.ini)
3. I used dynamic lights but I dont know if the others work or not. YEp they do and much better than the dyn ones so use them.
4. make sure your lights have a long enough radius that you can see the shadow. Kinda dumb to say becuase its so obviouse but I had it right and diddn't know it becuase of that.
5. dont expecct that any one will get that yes in fact you really havn't a clue how to get them going.
follow these steps and you will be fine.

