I just looked at those shots of Neverwinter Nights, and I think what they are doing may be similar to what I am doing, but may also not be quite the same.
If you look at the shots the shadows are very sharp looking, and the dragon's shadows seem to overlap without darkening eachother, which is correct behavior. My shadow system would not behave that way. Of course other shots appear to have the overlapping shadow thing going on, but those are where more than one light is visible.
It may be that they are generating a shadow map for each light that covers the whole area. Given that their shadow engine only has to work for top down view games, they could put in optimizatons which I cannot.
If you look at the shots the shadows are very sharp looking, and the dragon's shadows seem to overlap without darkening eachother, which is correct behavior. My shadow system would not behave that way. Of course other shots appear to have the overlapping shadow thing going on, but those are where more than one light is visible.
It may be that they are generating a shadow map for each light that covers the whole area. Given that their shadow engine only has to work for top down view games, they could put in optimizatons which I cannot.