Josh

If you retrieve a texture from the GPU into system memory, that will be extremely slow.

I jut downloaded it in one minute.

It's being downloaded from Amazon's servers.

Why not just load the image as a pixmap?

I don't see anything out of the ordinary there, but it sounds like you are creating an endless series of sound sources somehow. If you upload the project I can run it in the debugger and see what is happening.

Can you post the code for your player?

Now I must be added to the credits of Cyclone (TM), the amazing successful game on Steam!

It works. You don't even have to modify your existing materials or objects, just add an invisible dummy block that creates the shadow. glasstest.rar

Maybe you could add a second object with a shader that discards every pixel in the scene render, but still renders the shadow.

Are you doing the discard in the normal shader or the shadow shader?

I got that wrong, that would give you 75% opacity. This will make it more transparent: f ((int(gl_FragCoord.x + gl_FragCoord.y) % 4) != 1) discard;

Nope, it is discarding pixels in a uniform pattern, then the normal shadow blur filter mixes it all together.

Mod it by 4 instead of 2 and it will be more transparent.

While testing some code I accidentally discovered a way to do cheap semi-transparent shadows. The shadow casting object needs a shadow shader with a fragment program. Just add this line to the fragment main function: if ((int(gl_FragCoord.x + gl_FragCoord.y) % 2) == 1) discard; This is what it looks like with shadow filtering disabled: And this is what it looks like with normal shadow filtering. (Ambient light is black in this shot.)

SSAO in Ultra is a lot cleaner. I used a denoise filter to smooth the results: