"SSWift, are you gonna add stencil shadows support now that 1.88 seems to enable us to do so?"
If I did something with stencil shadows it would be a completely new system. But I'm not yet convinced that even with this limited access to the stencil buffer that we can do stencil shadows in Blitz. In order to do stencil shadows one needs to be able to either build shadow volumes manually, which we cannot do in Blitz for animated entities, or one needs to be able to "stretch" an entity along an arbitrary axis to form a shadow volume that way. Stretching an entity I believe involves something more complex than simply scaling an entity along an abritrary axis, and even if it does merely involve that, I'm not even sure we can scale an entity along an arbitrary axis. In the worst case scenario we need access to vertex shaders in order to do the stretching.
I wouldn't count on anyone getting real stencil shadows working in Blitz anytime soon. The stuff you've seen people do so far doesn't work on all video cards, has visual artifacts, and only makes stuff inside an entity appear shadowed, rather than make the entity itself appear to cast shadows.
If I did something with stencil shadows it would be a completely new system. But I'm not yet convinced that even with this limited access to the stencil buffer that we can do stencil shadows in Blitz. In order to do stencil shadows one needs to be able to either build shadow volumes manually, which we cannot do in Blitz for animated entities, or one needs to be able to "stretch" an entity along an arbitrary axis to form a shadow volume that way. Stretching an entity I believe involves something more complex than simply scaling an entity along an abritrary axis, and even if it does merely involve that, I'm not even sure we can scale an entity along an arbitrary axis. In the worst case scenario we need access to vertex shaders in order to do the stretching.
I wouldn't count on anyone getting real stencil shadows working in Blitz anytime soon. The stuff you've seen people do so far doesn't work on all video cards, has visual artifacts, and only makes stuff inside an entity appear shadowed, rather than make the entity itself appear to cast shadows.