So what is this 2nd shader exactly? I was under the impression that you could now use something other than Phong and or as well as. Can it be any other shader? Or is what I am thinking entirely different to what this new shader is?

Edit; nevermind

Spaces, yes, but there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it aside from 4 abilities on top, 3 upgrades on bottom.

I had tried swapping them and got no luck either--but what do I know?  I did do the passive fixed level in ability 4.

The setup looked a bit funky and I imagine the "Highlander abilities" are hard coded in and fill those "empty" spots?

There can be only one.

I have tested Rebellion retail and the shadow bug is still there, as prominent as ever. I believe the shadow bug has two major contributors to it.

The first contributor is that the shadow maps are extremely small. The 'squares' we're seeing are no doubt individual pixels of the shadow map. I thought maybe you could force higher resolution shadow maps in the settings file (Why waste all my GPU power, anyways?), but such is not possible.

The second contributor is that the engine doesn't seem to devote nearly enough shadow space to edges or thin constructs. This makes sense to an extent, but every single attennae in the game seems to create wildly flickering shadows, not to speak of curved wings, plating, and other such things. Some shadows create triangles and not even "pixels", resulting in very weird shadowing.

The attennae on the new TEC capital ship also produce very buggy shadows.

I seriously doubt a new version of convertxsi.exe would fix this, unless it allows you to manually define the resolution of a mesh's shadow maps. A lot of ships like my Kraken above have a lot of plating and tests yielded it all freaking out because of these bugs, and the bugs are prominent on many vanilla meshes.

Changes to AF and AA settings have no impact on the bug. While I zoomed in to point out the bugs, you'll see them clearly at any distance, especially if the ship is moving.

It's visible zoomed out. And the problem is very apparent on larger meshes (like the ones I posted early in the thread). The flickering is pretty distracting.

I have high shadows on (lower shadows seems to reduce the shadow map resolution further). It's only the self-shadowing that seems to freak out. Anyways, I'm going to revise the Kraken and see if I can manipulate the plating in a way that reduces that effect.

Thanks for the refs, too. These will be most useful in my update project.

It appears that you have to put in the moveAreaRadius and hyperspaceExitRadius for planets in the galaxy file; using the planet's own entity appears to be insufficient now. I'm extremely disappointed by this, it absolutely ruins several maps that I enjoy playing and/or have made.

Edit: Scratch that, they will work it seems, but the dev exe will bitch an error storm over it. This needs more testing.

AMD, but it's fairly updated. Would you mind getting me screenshots of your self-shadowing in much the same manner of my examples? I'm extremely curious if there's something else afoot.

You have more control, thus, you have more  you can do.  Whether positive or negative is in the eyes of the modder (generally, a positive).

Hmm. I do see the shadow map pixels on the colony capital, and on the small turrets with the ragnarov, but certainly not as prominent as some of mine.

I will have to investigate this issue very thoroughly if I am to proceed with my plans. I fear it will be unavoidable.

I'm using a 6970 single GPU. It could be a driver issue I suppose. I'll fool around with those settings on my next test run and see if I can figure something out.

Well well well, seems some stock Sins models have shadow issues. While I wasn't looking for them, I noticed the TEC scout has some.

For the sake of argument. How well do the "current" sets of modding tools we have now work with rebellion? (Harpos tools plus the forge tool set)