[Skybird]

Environmental shadows are not yet implemented, that'S why forest for example happen to look quite light - from above. But looking at them from ground level, units and their camouflage patterns often "melt" into the background given by forests quite nicely. Shadows are not yet included, because the military never demanded that feature. It seems it does not think that the lack of these change the simulation's realism for the worse.

Look at those shots at far away tanks with daylight optics. you hardly can see the targeted tanks too clearly, can you!?

Shadows are said to come later, along with night-daylight-cycles and more complete weather effects (fog, storm, rain). So far visibility conditions due to sandstorms, f.e., are implemented by directly reducing or increasing vision range via mission editor only. Which at least in desert scenarios doesn't look bad at all.

SB2, not released before 2008, probably, will be more game-oriented and thus feature more graphical gimmicks. All these feature are planned to be added to SPB as well while they are developed for SB2. They plan to release an addon (note that I do not say: "patch") every 5-6 month.

I agree, though, that the art of defining a colour palette that way so that the shadowed aspects of an object and the side it presents to the source of lights both look realistically and don't differ too much in contrast, so far has not been mastered by any sim that I know. Shadowed side of objects often look too dark, often almost black, while the enlightened sides of that object looks unrealistically bright. the biological phenomenon of human eye adopting to changing light conditions so that the changes in our relative and subjective perception do not appear to be as big as they are in physical reality has never been included in any sim so far. But all in all the colour palette of SBP seems to be much better than that of most other sims and games that I do know.