I must admit that I completely forgot about this game... but will check that out.

The game renderer sets up the fixed function pipeline with bad parameter(s). I modified the renderer to fix it. Now there are shadows but mostly only for the player character even when 'shadows' is set to 'full'.
I don't know if that's expected but here is the modified file anyway:

http://dege.fw.hu/temp/D3DDrv.zip

It should also work natively, but the game always crashes for me so couldn't try it out.

It looks wrong, player shadow disappears when it really shouldn't. I guess I need to see if I can find the legacy hardware/software than can run this with shadows and see exactly what it's supposed to look like. Sadly compatibility with this game's shadosw dropped before youtube become popular so I can't find any footage of this game running like it's supposed to 😒

Yes, I don't think it should work this way. For example, if I compare the Xbox version

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2gIPtS-x1Q&t=1m32s

to the "patched" PC one then I don't get any shadows at the same place.
I assume the two versions should work (render) the same way but weird, because when I debug it I cannot see anything related to shadow rendering. Or it runs on a different subtle path of the engine, depending on the view angle, object visibility, etc.
Like in Splinter Cell, when shiny floor is caused by an erroneous render path taken because of invisible shadows.

So I tried this on a Radeon HD 2400 on Windows XP. No shadows. Sadly while I do have the ATI Radeon 9800 someone claimed shadows was working on, I don't have an AGP motherboard.

This wasn't the most elaborate port btw, it wouldn't be shocking if the Xbox had better shadows than the PC version. The PC version just should have SOME shadows otherwise why would the menu option be there? It's just weird though. It's a 2005 game, it should support XP and a graphic card from 2007 shouldn't have severely broken compatibility with a 2005 game 😕 I'm going to see if I can get an earlier version of XP (and DirectX) installed to see if there might be something there.

So I found a AGP motherboard with a Pentium 4, installed the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro on it, installed XP and tried Advent Rising. No shadows.

Then I tried installing ATI driver and DirectX version from the time this was posted:
https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/3534 … /advent-rising/
still no shadows.

😕 😕 😕

I mean I see three alternatives:

1. I simply am misunderstanding what shadows are supposed to be in this game and there aren't any shadows in the intro area.
2. Shadows never worked, the option is a lie and the poster on the GeForce forums is also a liar.
3. Shadows only work on a very specific hardware setup, DirectX version, driver version or OS version.

None of them seem all that plausible 😐

I got shadows working, but I had to disable T&L to get them to show. See other thread. There's still no proper fix which is a shame.

Advent Rising - getting "full" shadows working with Advent Revising and dgVoodoo2 2.74?