PixelGuys
Item drop shadow is not aligned to the pixel grid
Creates floating subpixel artifacts on the north-east and south-west sides, which looks especially messy at normal scale
On dark items, it just looks like a big blob. Giving the shadow some transparency would fix this
I intentionally made the offset of the shadow less than one pixel because I didn't like how it looked when it is aligned.
The shadow is cut off by the texture in an awkward way, it's especially bad on something like the diamond, where it looks like someone just drew a straight line of black pixels on the textures.
As for weaker shadows I think you'll always end up messing up the contrast for some blocks, like here the stone and ore blocks have poor contrast. If I make the shadow stronger than this, then the pine log has poor contrast.
Yeah, the opacity doesn't help as much as I would have hoped.
I honestly think the best solution is just to not have a drop shadow at all. Item textures already/will have shaded outlines, which i think achieves the same effect. The lighting could be made more intense on blocks, to replace the "3D" effect the drop shadow provided
Currently the contrast of the item drops is currently tied to the contrast of blocks in the world.
Maybe this is a good time to decide whether it makes sense to increase the contrast in the world as well?
Maybe. I would have to see what that looks like. Regardless, they should have higher contrast in the inventory.
Current:
More:
Even more:
One thing that seems to happen is that the world gets darker the more contrast there is.
I'll have to think on this. I do think having a bit more contrast could look better, just not sure how much. You should post these to discord to see what others think.
I think image 2 looks best. Or maybe somewhere in between current and image 2
Another point against drop shadow: it doesn't work with translucent blocks.
I added the contrast, but I'm still hesitant to remove the shadows. Without them it looks kind of flat in my opinion:
As for translucent blocks, they are a different issue. It might be worth considering to draw them with transparency (which would allow for colored shadows).
It would look better with my updated textures. Let's wait and see until then.