Sorry, while I understand that people want to test it themselves, I want to get rid of all bugs I currently am aware of first. Also I want to use it for our mod exclusively for a time period (we are talking about some few months) where I can further polish it. We are currently working on a mod update and this will be very fitting to be included. When I see that there are no unexpected side effects I will create a standalone mod on ModDB which can be used for mods and also works with vanilla FL.

After the short teaser image here is a video of the current state including the new shadows:

http://www.flnu.net/downloads/fl0512.mkv

Edit: Here is another one.
http://www.flnu.net/downloads/fl0512_2.mkv

Wenn es bereit zum Testen ist, dann schreibe ich dir auf jeden Fall mein Feedback dazu

Hoffe dass es bald so weit ist, sieht super aus in den Videos!

Skotty has asked for the same thing. The shadows are currently PCF filtered, but since the resolution is so good now it only has an antialiasing effect.

But shouldn't be shadows in space only hard shadows anyway? The sun is so far away you basically get a point light and there is no atmosphere which scatters the light. This might be different in a nebula, though.

I will see if I can get a high poly model with good textures somewhere. The problem is ideally it also hast height maps since otherwise the self shadowing of the textures does not work. So it would have to use real geometry to make up for this.

@eigos: You'll have to wait a little bit more, but good to know there is nothing in the videos you find unfitting or something like that

I think I know what you mean. Basically you see things more from an artists viewpoint. I personally like the more realistic touch (which is a matter of opinion) and am not a fan of applying lots of effects (like bright bloom etc). So for me it would look really irritating if I don't get hard shadows in space with no nearby larger light source like a planet. But I suppose since I am used to rendering and image processing I have a lot more trained eyes than the usual user.

I already had started to look for soft shadow solutions, since FL has fake light sources placed at planets (fake reflection) and since they are so close the shadows would indeed be soft. But this isn't an easy topic plus it is not so much important. I'd rather add this after the initial release. For now I need to polish the rest and get it into a usable shape (including ingame GUI for settings etc).

While we're at this topic, since the new shadows have so much higher resolution I was able to enable point lights again and let them cast perspective projected shadows (FL uses them for e.g. fake planet reflections). This works surprisingly well since usually you would have to use cube map shadows. But we are most of the time not so close that this is really visible. So now even the FL explosions cast shadows. There might be cases, where they are wrong, though (being close enough to the light source).

:O Last one looks so sweet, especially the dock and a stuff in it
Cant wait to see what this one is capable of with modern models
We had a lots of modellers on TSP, why can't anyone share something to test?

if you have Discord, hit me up, I will hook you up with this: https://sketchfab.com/models/e7a1b0d441c74d848f6744fb273eb38e

I have a more detailed model in the works, but it isnt textured yet.
Im experimenting with PBR on bits of the ship, though: https://p3d.in/eodqr

P.S. my discord is eigos #4005