To basically reiterate what Lothic wrote, if this is something that MWM can put into the game with minimum fuss, perhaps as the result of some other work or update, then they should do so. Otherwise, in order to get something that other people might sometimes see, assuming they don't have shadow quality reduced or turned off, not so much.

Stuff like this with shadows sounds cool looking and creepy or whatever, but this is not, in its heart and soul, a horror-genre game, and I think that belongs more to that particular niche. Just my 2 cents.

For the sake of discussion the Devs might be able to figure out some clever way to give us special kinds of auras that could override/replace/deactivate the default shadows a character would normally cast. This might then allow people to have generic "shadow horns/tentacles/wings" of some kind. But even if this were possible I doubt these auras would be editable/customizable in any way so if you didn't like the specific shape/size of the hard-coded shadow appendages you'd probably be stuck. For instance unlike normal horns we'd probably just get one "shadow horn" aura and the Devs would have to hope it was good enough to satisfy as many people as possible.

As far as "animated shadow auras" go I again suspect there would be no real way to manually control/edit how they moved or looked. They would likely have to be hardwired to specific movement cycles that may not easily mesh with the character concepts people wanted these auras for in the first place. This may be fundamentally unworkable anyway given what Gangrel mentioned about Unreal 4 Engine's built-in shadowing system. For all we know it may be a relative PITA to attempt to force shadows work in non-standard ways under that environment.

An alternative to messing around with how shadows work might be allowing players to set certain costume items (like horns) invisible. I think this is what AlienMafia was alluding to earlier in this thread. This way you'd have your choice of horns, wings, etc. on your character but they would only be "visible" in terms of the shadow they cast. While this might be a solution in certain cases it may open up a whole world of other problems, not the least of which is dealing with the possibilities of people figuring out how to get naughty "nude" characters (via invisible costume parts) into the game.

Either way even though the topic of "customized shadows" is interesting it's likely one of those problematic can-of-worms the Devs either can't or won't want to deal with.

masterghostartist wrote:

people are always worried about devs attention for other things. but then why bother with costumes? they are not required for play.....
so, what to do? make the horns a costume item, that are there, but are invisible. they would pop a shadow because they are there, but not appear on the head. that solves one version without much work. hopefully.
they rest would need some serious attention. but at least horns could be pulled off.

I realize everyone has their own cool ideas/opinions about what they wish to see in CoT and there's really nothing wrong with that. The only problem with all those great ideas is that some of them are much harder for software people to code than others. If a hypothetical Feature X would take 10 hours of effort to make and another Feature Y would take 1,000 hours it's easy to see that Feature X is much more likely to make it into the game than Feature Y. Oftentimes engineering compromises like that are just that simple.

For what it's worth I actually like your basic idea about "shadow horns" and it seems like they'd be relatively easy to implement in the form of a uniquely hardwired "invisible" costume item. I have a couple of CoT character ideas that would likely make use of something like that for some of their costumes if it were available. Even the idea of being able to manually turn off a character's full shadow is probably a fairly simple suggestion not only for your "vampire" example but also for those people who might not want to have a shadow regardless for whatever reasons.

On the other hand I suspect the general idea of having "animated shadows" that could move independently of the body is probably far too complex for it to be worthwhile (at least in a game like this). Again they might be able to fudge a few simple versions of that with special auras, but like I said before there'd be a lot of problems with making that work effectively for most people.

Bottomline I'd be fine with the CoT Devs giving us the "easy" shadow-based suggestions and holding off on the harder ones indefinitely.

Considering shadows/shadow effects are usually the first thing people turn down in order to improve performance - I can't see the devs putting too much effort into this. If it's a simple matter to implement? Fine! Maybe as part of an aura? But if it requires a great deal of coding - I really can't see it being high on the devs to-do list - if at all.

I never tried it myself, but googling for it.. it might be possible.
Someone made a Shader called InvisibleShadowCaster:
http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/269292/having-an-invisible-object-that-casts-shadows.html

It might be possible in Unreal too, but I dont know what sort of unwanted side effects could come from doing it like this. :/

Darth Fez wrote:

To basically reiterate what Lothic wrote, if this is something that MWM can put into the game with minimum fuss, perhaps as the result of some other work or update, then they should do so. Otherwise, in order to get something that other people might sometimes see, assuming they don't have shadow quality reduced or turned off, not so much.

Looking at it from a programmer's perspective, it would need to be set up as part of the character meshes. For example, an option for a particular 'piece' of a character's costume that flagged it to prevent the mesh for that piece from being rendered when the character was displayed, but would still be considered when rendering the shadow. Unfortunately, because MWM's working with a pre-existing game engine, a feature like that would be engine-specific enough that you would have to know the actual internals of the game engine pretty well to be able to say whether it's a) possible, and b) easy. I suspect that the support for various forms of transparency aren't going to be particularly amenable for the purpose.