Shadows and a Windows Bugfix?

Today's update is first and foremost a hopeful bugfix which is the portion that is uploaded to itch. The second part of this update post is to talk about shadows.

Starting with the hopeful bugfix: huge thanks to Richard Mitton for reporting a bug that caused Funmi to crash on probably everyone's machine. I unfortunately don't have many machines IE 3 to test on so if you crash, seriously send me a screenie and any other info you may have to give me (really just specs if you know em'). First and foremost, I knew this bug was 100% the Windows side of things due to the fact that it was a Window's DLL that couldn't be found. Of course, searching online for said DLL only gave me links to """"download""" websites to """get""" the DLL so there was no useful info online unto what this DLL actually is in terms of what library I may need to not link against to not require it to run. That or, from what I gather looking through my compilation options, what compiler option to not use such that this DLL isn't required to run. When I looked through what I had for compilation settings, I had both /Zi and /Zo enabled which both are extremely helpful if you're trying to debug your executable (check out what they mean on Microsoft Docs if you're curious). However, I didn't realize that as I had copied all my compile options but changed only a few when compiling the release version of the game so I hope that by removing these, the game will run on more machines now (still tho, I don't know if this actually fixes this particular issue as it doesn't make a ton of sense that having more debug info in the PDB and what not would require an entirely new DLL but I may just not know enough Windows).

As for the shadows part of today. I was hoping to push the shadows onto itch like right now as it really did seem possible on the onset. What i'm currently attemping is are the simple "shadow maps" style aka render the scene from your light source(s) to determine how much light something is getting. Most if not all graphics APIs tend to support the depth buffer by default so all you really do is render once through the API and copy over the depth buffer and do a comparision with the final rendering image pass where you draw your world like normal while also now having the shadow map depth buffer and compare the two depth values between dest text and the depth. Now here's the part where I tell you this jape is over because I don't actually know how to make shadow maps work after this point / if that's truly how they work! It does appear that the comparision is important and since the depth buffer is just a simple "how deep" the things are, you'd probably just say if the currently rendering image from the main camera is like less than the depth buffer's z, that's a shadow, else light it up. What I just wrote is surely wrong though, so do not take that as fact but instead, go test this or just wait until I get around to writing my post tomorrow sorry!
(Thumbnail shown is the depth buffer from the light source's PoV, so it is promising!)

Anyways i'm going to get some food. Thanks for reading and tell me what you like / hate about the game! Have an awesome day :)