I have been wondering for sometime, and lately I saw the Andoran TC. The question is how do you create the effect of an object casting a shadow in real-time. Do projects like Andoran make the objects a character that doesn't move? or is there another technique to get the effect. Thanks.

Presently, the only way to get arbitrary meshes render shadows is to create them as actors in the CS. But they come with a performance penalty, as the game can only process so many and remain playable (in terms of framerate).