How odd. I haven't used Angleproject before, but I've never heard of a problem occurring in VS builds with just a single file out of a project - usually such issues occur on a project-by-project basis. (Unless BuiltInFunctionEmulator.cpp is the only .cpp in that project?)

Anyway, (sadly) usually the first thing to try with weird VS build issues is to do a clean build, in case its internal dependency information is corrupted somehow. In VS, go to Build -> Batch Build, click Select All and then Clean. This will wipe out the built files for all platforms and configurations. Then try to build the desired platform/configuration again.

If it still doesn't work, try poking around in the project properties - right-click on the project node in Solution Explorer and choose Properties. Look specifically at the output/intermediate paths and names in the General tab - you should see something like $(Platform)\$(Configuration), which means it will generate paths like x64\Debug. It may have been changed from the defaults. The project properties can also vary per platform and configuration (see the dropdowns at the top of the properties dialog), so it's possible someone meant to change it for x64 and accidentally changed it for x86 as well, or some such.

Another place to look is in Build -> Configuration Manager. That sets which project configurations are built for each solution configuration. It's possible something is messed up there too (e.g. the x64 solution configuration builds the project in x86 or some such).

I googled around a bit, but no one seems to know a solid way to get the current video mode in DXGI...the closest I found was this StackOverflow question which recommends using EnumDisplaySettings, then trying to find a matching DXGI mode.

Darn, I came here hoping for some good hierarchical temporal memory criticism and all I got was a lousy shizer.

For general shadows in outdoor areas, I think cascaded shadow maps are the way to go. It's a proven technique that's been used in quite a lot of games and it allows you to easily tweak the trade-off between quality and performance by adjusting the number and size of cascades.

Additionally, if you resolve all the shadow maps into a single screen-space mask, then apply the mask in the lighting shaders, you can have a lot of freedom about how many shadow maps you use and how you combine them together without adding a lot of expense to your shaders. It's "deferred shadows", sort of (doesn't require deferred shading, although having the depth buffer available to sample as a texture is very helpful). For instance you could decide to have a shadow map per car when the cars are close enough to the camera, and you could blend the shadows from the per-car maps smoothly with the shadows from the overall cascade.

There's some more details about this in Ben Diamand's GDC 2010 talk on shadows in God Of War III. The screen-space mask I referred to is called a "white buffer" in his talk.

Yep, I'm on Twitter as @Reedbeta.