Shadow

Flag:	Shadow
File(s):	rules(md).ini (Proj), art(md).ini(Anim)
Values:	Boolean values: yes or no, true or false, 1 or 0
Default:	yes
Applicable to:	Projectiles (Shape Only), Animations

Whether the Projectiles or Animations has a shadow.

The game uses the latter half of the entire Shape frames as shadow drawing frames, so there's no absolute correspondence between the shadow and the original image.

• For Projectiles, this latter half is fixed as shadow frames. If Shadow=no, the shadow simply won't be drawn.
• For Animations, if Shadow=no, the latter half of frames will still be treated as image frames for playback.

Animations with Bouncer=yes are forced to have shadows that cannot be disabled.

• In this case, instead of distinguishing shadow frames, the game directly applies grayscale adjustment to the image for shadow use.
  • Starting from Phobos Build#0, you could disable this with Shadow=no.
    • Beginning with Build#40 (although the release notes mentioned Build#39, it wasn't actually implemented at that time), it was changed to use ExtraShadow=no.

Testid123's attempt: If you want the shadow of a building to be higher than the object Delete shadows or do not create shadows for SHP buildings. Then go create the shadow of the SHP building in the form of an animation instead, then set Layer=ground, YSortAdjust=543 Doing this will add realism to the shadow.

Notes

The shadow rendering layer of aerial units often has issues.

• For example, if the shadow of a unit located further northwest (screen-up) happens to overlap with the on-screen position of another aerial unit's body, the more southeastern unit might be obscured by the former's shadow.

Since the game is not actually 3D, shadows obviously cannot be calculated for situations where they fall on non-flat surfaces.

• For example, if there is a cliff behind a building, the shadow will still be drawn flat.
  • Therefore, in Z-depth computations, the shadow layer is below the cliff image layer, causing the building's shadow to be blocked by the cliff instead.

When a frame is treated as a shadow, any pixel that is not 0 (as the background color/transparent color) will be considered valid.

• In SHP Builder's shadow mode, color index #1 actually corresponds to the selected color index before entering shadow mode. However, after entering shadow mode, the program will only display color index 0 and the current color, while treating the current color as color index #1 in the palette.

Bugs/Side-Effects/Unexpected Limitations

• Sometimes the shadow of AircraftTypes is drawn under certain objects.