Personally I find planet shadows to be extremely important, but I don't rasterize them because sharp edges look bad on them. Instead, I raytrace the shadows as a final step to the shadow buffer (I buffer the shadows so I can use temporal shadow filtering), which allows me to smooth them out at the edges. No flickering, no aliasing, they look great and honestly run very quickly.

Here are some nice screens I took while testing (click on the images for a large version):






This will be the last for a while as I need to find the remaining bugs and also try to use a better shadow rendering technique.

Feedback is always welcome!

Thanks!
It was actually surprisingly easy to enable shadows for the second light source FL uses. So I replaced three of the screenshots with new ones in my post above (the ones without statistics in the upper left corner). I was expecting it to be unstable, since FL switches between the light sources rather often, but so far it seems to work very well and looks really good for my taste.

Well, currently the plan is to release it first exclusively for a mod update of our mod, but to open it up for all after some months. Basically I want this to be one basic feature of the update plus it is easier to find bugs if I know the environment it is tested in.

The plan is not to keep it under wraps, so that everyone can use it (else all the work would be for nothing), but I see it happening more like next year. It all depends on how well things go. Keep in mind that I still have not fixed everything (although I am getting closer now).

As an artist, are there any specific details you don't like in the screenshots / videos (except the weird white stripe reflections from which I think I know where they come from)?

Thanks for the offer! I have been thinking and actually it would save me a lot of time if someone could create all the normal and heightmaps for the vanilla textures. For now the vanilla textures are automatically upscaled and filtered with a program I wrote. I had to create the height maps myself, which took some time and only include a few for now. The normal maps are generated from the textures. My intention was to approximate the maps with some algorithms when the rest of the OpenGL wrapper is working.

I understand if you don't want them first used by our mod, but if they would be ready for a public release this would also help me a lot.

Hehe, thanks!

But you have to be patient. I don't have the time to work full time on this. On the positive side I was able to fix one major issue today:
Before:

After:

This was not so easy because I needed to duplicate vertices and this is tricky with the model format FL has. I also still need to fine tune the algorithm which generates the tbn data (those of you who now tangent space will know what I mean). But at least those weird white stripes are gone.

Issues like that are the reason why this will still take months to be in a state where I can release it. It is of no use if you fly through FL with weird graphical artefacts and flickering. Breaks the atmosphere. I hope you can understand my reasoning

Actually this is the one I patched . My plan was to upload the fixes I did but I never got around to do it, at least not yet

I've found the error concerning texture filtering. Here is a better video: http://www.flnu.net/downloads/fl2808.mp4

This will be the last one for some time. There won't be much new stuff I can post for a while, since it is just fixing the remaining errors.

I hope you enjoyed the videos and understand that this will still take some time