Sprint #5

Task: Figure out how to fake the shadows effectively, or a way to do them dynamically


Ok this has been super hard.  I've been going over tutorials that I found online and trying to see if I cvould modify them to fit our game.  The problem can be seen in this picture:

As you can see the shadows are highly distorted and don't really work in our game in that they no longer retain their shape in shadow form.  So I found this other shadow tutorial http://www.riemers.net/eng/Tutorials/XNA/Csharp/Series3/Pixel_shader.php which is in 3D but we might be able to port it to 2D.  Garrett is also helping me with this and he has an idea using translation matrices which seems to work somewhat effectively.  Here are some things that we might be able to improve on Garrett's in order to make it work:

1) When the player is vertically aligned with the light, the shadow completely disappears which I don't think should happen.  I think it might be rotating at some point which causes the problem.
2) Make it so the translation isn't too far away, right now it seems to be going further than it needs to.
3) We some how need to let the shadow know not to go through the ground as show below.