Hello all, Looking for the best way to create a shadow effect without losing too much on the performance side, preferably nothing :). Here's what I'm doing:
This is a shadow for a square. That's it. the shadow should move with the square, but the quality is pretty much irrelevant as long as it has some falloff and it's a square shadow moving with the square mesh, so no realistic shadow effects needed. this is a 2d game so you will never see the shadow from any other angle.
Any help would be appreciated
EDIT: In response to people posting about the blob projector,would a blob projector be less memory intensive than just an image of a square that has an alpha?(since this is a 2d game, the shadows don't exactly have to project)
Assuming the ground is flat, use a quad with a transparent texture for the shadow. Blob shadows can be expensive because they re-draw the entire object even if the shadow is projected just on a small part of it.
Well, i'm not 100% sure how the projector works internally, but i think he just add the projector material to all objects in his frustum and adjust the uv-coordinates accordingly.
Performance is relative. The projector may have more cpu usage, while a seperate plane can cause another draw call. If you develop for iPhone (I'm not an iPhone dev.) it's important to keep the draw calls low (very low: around 20 what i've heard). In the end it depends on the platform and hardware you develop for. Sorry but can't say much more on that.