Ben Parry · Senior Graphics Programmer

Yeah, so we've had discussions about this on and off for years, in fact. For a lot of the static shadows work, we put a static shadow area around a hero location or something, to at least get the static shadows on it. We've had some discussions about trying to more easily support more of them, but also trying to support live ones that update. Within a certain distance, maybe you pick out where you need some dynamic shadows and you draw them over there. This is one of a dozen ways that we've talked about trying to claw back some resolution and not spend all the memory on the GPU on it. The reason we've not actually got onto it, though, is that, unlike a lot of the other things that we work on, it doesn't really block any of the other content teams. Nobody's waiting on us to make the shadows nice before they can implement something. It's always something that we could do and check in, and it would just be done.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

You bring up a good point. Folks who follow our development very closely, who watch ATV, RTV, Calling All Devs and stuff, can probably get a sense over the months of how often priorities shift. Oh, I thought you were doing this next, and now we find out that this isn't next, this other thing is next. And a lot of times that comes up because of what you just talked about: blockers. We were going to move to this thing next, but that work is dependent on somebody else finishing their work, and their work is not done yet. So things tend to get reprioritized quite often based on dependencies. It's the things that free up more people. If you could work on this and it allows three teams to do their job once you're done, or you can work on this and it allows one team to do their job, or you can do this and nobody else is affected by it, it makes it a pretty easy decision what you're going to be working on next.

Ben Parry · Senior Graphics Programmer

I mean, the static shadows work was in theory down at that priority. It's just that I think we reached a certain point where people were putting things in and it did just look terrible. And so we were like, okay, we can move this up the priorities just a little bit. We can at least get static shadows on a target location, because I guess partly there is a blocker there: the art team needs to see what they're creating. Does it look okay in game? They can't just put a load of stuff in and say, this is going to look great when shadows finally happen. So being able to see something in the distance with shadows on it, and see that it actually does look good, I guess that was kind of a blocker for them.