Shadows | Simonschreibt.

This time i talk a bit retro. This is nothing you want to use in actual games. At Egosoft we’ve an Arcade Machine with titles like 1943 (not Battlefield 1943 ;) ) and i really like how they faked their transparent shadows.

What do you do, if you can’t use “real” transparency? Stunts just didn’t render every 2nd pixel:

Source: Dakksters Blog

1943 used another approach. They rendered the solid shadow of the airplane only every 2nd frame. I’m sorry for the low FPS of the Gif, it looks better at the Arcade Machine. Because there you’ve a higher frame rate and the illusion works better. But the video i recorded didn’t work so well, this is why i faked the fake in Photoshop.

Airplane by Chris Ensell

This let me think about this optical illusion with the cage and a bird. I my eyes, it’s a cool thought to bring something like this into the game world.

I didn’t embed the video directly to avoid any tracking from Google and complications with the DSGVO.