So I started playing the game and nothing haves shadows, what's going on?

Welcome to neverland

Hate to bump an old thread but I found that apparently this is another PC port that relied on special hardware for a graphical effect.

According to this forum post:
https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/353473/pc-games/advent-rising/

Apparently the shadows only worked on an ATI 9800 Pro card. I have tried enabling the shadow ticks in the config files but I have had no success. Even tried 3DAnalyze with no success to emulate the shadows. If there is a way to get them working or if someone knows how to get a wrapper to work with this game, I would love to know.

Interesting, thanks.

There is a post where someone was not able to get shadows working on (I believe it was) that card as well. There is also a post where someone was able to get shadows working on dgVoodoo2. Based on it, its not really worth putting energy into it. Either way, there's conflicting info. But, one thing is known that shadows are a pain to get working.

I imagine that something like Nvidia Remix would be a far better. it does cast better shadows than the game's version ever would:

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/13782239/232175920-35ab73d3-57e6-4c16-91ce-80765bf20053.png

https://github.com/NVIDIAGameWorks/rtx-remix/issues/76

Tested latest Remix version. The git issues can be resolved by disabling Developer Settings > Game Setup > Parameter Tuning > Heuristics > Orthographic UI. But, creates antother problem in that it stops the menu UI from showing up (didn't look into that one at this time). There could be an alternative way but this at least confirms what causes the problem.

But, no cutscenes are showing, ALT+TAB or something is causing the game to get stuck running, the sky goes missing (starting to look like that needs material changes maybe), glass isn't transparent, there's some other problems, and a good amount of reworking things that needs to be done after that. Shadows do look great with some minor changes that gets those working.

All one needs to enable Remix is to download Remix, uncompress, put into the game's system folder, rename d3d8to9.dll to d3d8.dll, start the game. Do need an Nvidia RTX GPU to work with Remix. It will show the remix banner at the top of the screen on immediate start after game splash if its working. If it acts weird and freezes or whatever then press ALT + Enter as that works in my case and then enable Remix's fullscreen setting to fix that issue.

Just adding this here for reference. I won't do anything further with this as there's too much to do to get it working well. In time maybe someone will and the game will. At least there's opportunity for ray tracing, enhanced textures, *shadows*, and more here in the future.