Those that follow my twitter account have seen this already, but I wanted to let everyone know I’m working on a system for 2D dynamic shadows, again.
However, this one is very different from the last sample I made on the subject. In that one, you had to define the geometry of the shadow casters, and build the shadows based on that. This process also implied lots of computations done each frame on the CPU, which yielded in low peformance. So all in all, even though it looked great, I was never really satisfied with tat technique for shadows.
I spent a lot of time thinking of an alternative way to do dynamic 2D shadows, while not using the CPU too much, and having unlimited complexity for the shadow casters. And two weeks ago, the idea hit me. I’m not going to go into technical details just yet, since I plan to make a nice tutorial about this, but I can say that my idea was based on taking the concept of shadow maps from 3D and somehow use it in 2D.
Here’s two pictures of how it looks so far:
As you can see, the casters can have any shape and complexity, and furthermore, the complexity of the shadow casters has no effect on the framerate.
I’m still working on this, but you’ll know as soon as it’s done.
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