I just noticed something odd in FS2004. Lately, I've been creating small ground bases around my add-on buildings, and using aerial photos to give an accurate feel for the "grounds" around a building. I noticed that the automatic shadow generation in FS2004 does not seem to work on my custom grounds planes. This includes shadows from the building OR that cast by an aircraft (I use a helicopter/slew to do up-close checks). Shadows are cast from objects/aircraft onto the default underlaying FS2004 ground terrain.As a test, I created a "sundial" object which was basically just a tall cylinder towering above a wider base. I also placed a couple of additional cylinders around this sundial to see what happens in FS2004. As I suspected, I see shadows being cast from "most" (though not all - very strange) of the cylinders onto just the default ground. No shadows are being cast on each other, on on the sundial base.This may be a related problem, but I also noticed that the flat planes I use sometimes causes an odd "inverse shadow" to be display ABOVE the plane - especially in cases where I manual editted the ground terrain to be 3D (i.e. hilly) to more closely match the elevation mesh. This later process has been a bit of a pain to get right and it is disheartening to see the weird shadow hovering overhead!I have not done anything special with MAkeMdl or BGLcomp - running with whatever default behaviours these have straight out of the SDKs.Any idea what's happening here, esp. - is there some way to fix this odd shadow problem. I have examined a couple of airport addons and notice that shadows ARE being displayed properly from building onto the underlaying custom-made airport tarmac/grounds (somehow).

FS2004 shadows are quite basic, and most of the issues you mention are inherent. Objects cannot cast shadows on themselves or other objects, shadows are just another 'object' -- they are always horizontal and flat, so if the underlying terrain isn't flat they'll stick out of the ground -- hence your hovering shadows.FSX is a great improvement -- objects can cast shadows on themselves and other objects, although this still isn't perfect.To get shadows on your ground polygons, you probably need to use the FS2002-GMAX-gamepack technique covered in detail over at FSDeveloper.com.There's a lot of discussion of this over there, but a good starting point is the wiki:www.fsdeveloper.com/wiki/index.php?title=Ground_polygons_with_GMaxHowever there is no way I can think of to get shadows to show up on 3D objects in FS2004.-RobinGodzone Virtual Flight, for 'Real New Zealand' sceneryhttp://www.windowlight.co.nz