I believe Ragecage had some shadows in Duskbane. I don't know if the full-on fancy demo ever was released, though.

Well, the Fury site is down, perhaps permamentally, so I can't direct you to their forums or to the demo directly.

I'll try to upload it to my own host in a minute.

I was doing shadows on entities kind of in the Diablo/DiabloII style. It involves HookEntity, then every frame, for each entity that is currently displayed on the screen (you'd have to check):

1. Make a sillouettte of the frame that entity is showing, optionally skewed and/or flipped vertically (to simulate directional light).

2. Draw the sillouette. It should be translucent, and you could be fancy and vary the lucency based on how close to a 'light source' that entity is.

3. Draw the frame that is supposed to be shown for that entity on top of it.

That's the quick and dirty way to do it, and works pretty well and gives nice results... that process also lends itself well to optimization and user configuration, if you wanted to give the user a choice of different performance choices (for example, it would be easy to write such a routine so that only the player's shadow is drawn, only a certain amount of shadows are drawn, only simple circle shadows are drawn, etc.).

You could do other things to the shadows too, if you wanted to experiment with performance vs. quality. You could blur the shadows, add perspective skewing, you could blend it so that it slowly fades the further away it is, rather than being a uniform lucency, you could do some sort of obstruction checking so that the shadow would realistically bend up a wall, etc... so you can make it as fancy or as simple as you want. I suggest having all of this stuff user configurable so that they user can pick and choose the features they want on at runtime, if they have a slower or faster computer. Choices are good!

Yeah, I wasn't sure if that would work.

It all installed from an exe, so there must be more to it than in the folder. Damn.

As is my normal convention, once installing something, if it works, I then delete the install exe.

It works on a variation of javascript, I believe.

Yeah, it's not going to work unless you install it from the setup program. One of the major downsides of using VB/COM.

I'll see if I can grab a setup package for it when I get home. Haven't really had time to work on the engine since I started work (good ol' non-compete agreements) and the site went down when my hosting company decided to redirect my domain name to a porn site, but I still have all the files sitting around so I should be able to scrounge something up.

On a side note, I've been putting off writing a detailed article about my lighting algorithm, so if you're interested in making a similar lighting system, drop me a note (or send me an instant message).

I can't, it would be against the law :(

Of course, that would probably require maps to be built using a relatively restrictive template. It's a shame we're tethered to maped. good as it is.

Thou shalt not discourteously forget to demos thou hast mentioned.

paperdolling... ahh yes... fun stuff.... I really need to finish duskbane ;_;

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As a side note, hardware accelerated verge is something that I'm interesting in doing in the future. Right now I'm still playing with rewriting the verge core interpreter but some day I plan to move on to OpenGL accelerated verge. Then we can do stuff like not just have 'normal' paperdolling but instead be able to clad the character in the groovy plaid jumpsuit of disco power (by using hardware accelerated texturing).