So about those shadows....

Old Duck

Old Duck
stormyuk said:
PS. I am happy with the shadows on my PS4. :D
Click to expand...

In all seriousness (and on topic), I know I could have a PS4 Pro and also be happy with shadows. In hindsight I'm glad I didn't spend $350 to "fix" these shadows, because all the other bugs would remain, and every other game I play on PS4 Slim looks fine, including NMS. ED is the only game in my collection that looks bad on my Slim.

Just to remind you - I'm not bothered by 'soft' shadows. I don't expect the razor-sharp shadows of the Pro. It's the terrible flickering that I experience when in motion, which makes flybys of megaships, stations, planetary outposts, and other shadow-casting objects visually painful. It didn't used to be this way - look at my Twitter feed from this time last year and you'll see I was very happy with the original 2.3 release for PS4. These flickering, broken shadows came with a subsequent update, and as of 3.2 they have not been fixed.

If browsers still supported the HTML [blink] tag, I could really drive my point home in a most annoying way [haha]

That's my 3.2 update. I'll come back and revive this thread when 3.3 drops. Maybe with the new lighting system I'll be able to finally say, "The shadows have been fixed!"
 
Last edited:

Old Duck

Old Duck
I'm so desperate for the graphic shaders to get fixed that the first thing I tried when the PS4 6.00 update dropped was my Dolphin down on a planet. Unfortunately #ElephantButtLeather is still alive and well on PS4 Slim. While this is less noticeable in my Keelback, I LOVE my Dolphin and Orca and miss them terribly. I bought paint for my Orca, so I have an investment here! It also affects many other ships, including the venerable Anaconda.

While everyone else is campaigning for their congress critter here in America, I'm campaigning for Lloyd's Loyal Lackies to FIX THESE SHADERS. At the very least, please fix the cockpit shaders as detailed in this bug report. With the new Q4 update coming, I'm very excited about the game again, but as you can see from my signature and a variety of videos / photos in the bug reports (some provided by other players, so it's not my PS4 Slim), some of the best ships are currently ruined by this bug / internal setting.

MAKE ELITE DANGEROUS GREAT AGAIN

ps - killing elephants for their butt skin is illegal AFAIK :p
 

Latent Buzzard

L
Old Duck said:
I'm so desperate for the graphic shaders to get fixed that the first thing I tried when the PS4 6.00 update dropped was my Dolphin down on a planet. Unfortunately #ElephantButtLeather is still alive and well on PS4 Slim. While this is less noticeable in my Keelback, I LOVE my Dolphin and Orca and miss them terribly. I bought paint for my Orca, so I have an investment here! It also affects many other ships, including the venerable Anaconda.

While everyone else is campaigning for their congress critter here in America, I'm campaigning for Lloyd's Loyal Lackies to FIX THESE SHADERS. At the very least, please fix the cockpit shaders as detailed in this bug report. With the new Q4 update coming, I'm very excited about the game again, but as you can see from my signature and a variety of videos / photos in the bug reports (some provided by other players, so it's not my PS4 Slim), some of the best ships are currently ruined by this bug / internal setting.

MAKE ELITE DANGEROUS GREAT AGAIN

ps - killing elephants for their butt skin is illegal AFAIK :p
Click to expand...

XB1X. You get to start a new commander and enjoy working shadows whilst they (maybe) fix the PS4 port. You can help justify the cost by considering the additional library of games a new platform opens up to you.
 

Old Duck

Old Duck
Latent Buzzard said:
XB1X. You get to start a new commander and enjoy working shadows whilst they (maybe) fix the PS4 port. You can help justify the cost by considering the additional library of games a new platform opens up to you.
Click to expand...

I almost bought a PS4 Pro, but in the end I couldn't justify the cost to fix what is essentially a simple bug in one game. If ALL shadows looked like this on PS4 Slim, then the upgrade would be a no-brainer, but it's ONLY Elite Dangerous that has this problem, and only after certain updates were released.

And then there's the idea of actually rewarding Frontier for this bug by giving them even more money for another copy of ED on a different platform, which I have a real problem with (though I suppose I could buy a used copy like I did with NMS).

Funny thing is, the OG and Slim versions of the PS4 are much more popular by sales than the Pro. While Pro and XB1X users seem to make up the majority of players in this forum, it's false metric. Frontier really shouldn't treat the OG / Slim as "second-rate citizens", because we are the majority.

BTW, do you have a regular XBox? I'm curious if it suffers the same problems I've detailed in my bug report.
 

Morbad

Morbad
Old Duck said:
I recently had the opportunity to test Elite Dangerous on the PS4 Pro. One of the major things that tempted me to purchase a Pro was the promise of better shadows in Elite Dangerous. And yes, shadows are pretty darn amazing in ED's quality mode on the PS4 Pro! However, for reasons I saved for another thread, I'm returning the Pro and sticking with my Slim. While I may be the exception in the forums, I believe overall I'm the 'rule', in that many more PS4 gamers in general own the 'vanilla' PS4 instead of the Pro. So about those 'vanilla' shadows...

I do not expect the very sharp, dynamic, and long-range shadows that PS4 Pro gets in quality mode. I realize that has to be GPU intensive. I'm okay with soft or even a bit blurry shadows, to a point. My biggest complaint with ED's shadows is the extreme flickering, which creates these "Yars revenge" patterns on the mailslot and flashing, strobe-like patches everywhere else. I already submitted this as a bug back when 2.4 dropped, and it sounded like it was being treated as such, yet here we are many months later and it's still really bad.
Click to expand...

Sounds like the performance preset uses sloppy depth bias settings.

The PC version had this issue until 3.1.x, but in the opposite direction (too many peter panning shadows rather than excessive shadow acne).

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/wi...ommon-techniques-to-improve-shadow-depth-maps

I was able to manually fix most of the issues I had with the PC version's shadows, but I'm doubtful you have the same control over the PS4 version...though I could be wrong.
 

Latent Buzzard

L
Old Duck said:
I almost bought a PS4 Pro, but in the end I couldn't justify the cost to fix what is essentially a simple bug in one game. If ALL shadows looked like this on PS4 Slim, then the upgrade would be a no-brainer, but it's ONLY Elite Dangerous that has this problem, and only after certain updates were released.

And then there's the idea of actually rewarding Frontier for this bug by giving them even more money for another copy of ED on a different platform, which I have a real problem with (though I suppose I could buy a used copy like I did with NMS).

Funny thing is, the OG and Slim versions of the PS4 are much more popular by sales than the Pro. While Pro and XB1X users seem to make up the majority of players in this forum, it's false metric. Frontier really shouldn't treat the OG / Slim as "second-rate citizens", because we are the majority.

BTW, do you have a regular XBox? I'm curious if it suffers the same problems I've detailed in my bug report.
Click to expand...

I never got to try Elite on my original XB and no longer have it so I couldn't say unfortunately. The reason I said the XB1X was because the cost of the Pro wasn't justified just to fix one game but the cost of a XB1X might be justified by fixing one game and opening up a different platform of games to experience (e.g. Subnautica, although that is now coming PS).

You're absolutely right though that they shouldn't be treating the OG / Slim as a second class citizen which they do seem to be doing. Despite their assurances, I'm sure the platform has about as much priority as the Mac version and we all know how that turned out. Probably the only reason that the OG / Slim hasn't been dropped is because Sony wouldn't let them.

What you say about not rewarding poor behaviour is also understandable and personally I regret how much I've spent on micro transactions for this game. If I had of reached the tipping point of annoyance by the time I got the XB1X I probably wouldn't have picked it up on there as well. I'm now also in the position of refusing to spend any further money on it until things change. There's no easy answers to that but it might be worth considering the joy that ED clearly brings you whilst playing a working version, versus the distaste of giving FDev another $20 (Horizons on sale). Of course you wouldn't have to buy any micro transactions on the new platform so you could think of it as having another commander making a protest vote.
 

Old Duck

Old Duck
Morbad said:
Sounds like the performance preset uses sloppy depth bias settings.

The PC version had this issue until 3.1.x, but in the opposite direction (too many peter panning shadows rather than excessive shadow acne).

I was able to manually fix most of the issues I had with the PC version's shadows, but I'm doubtful you have the same control over the PS4 version...though I could be wrong.
Click to expand...

Thank you!

Latent Buzzard said:
The reason I said the XB1X was because the cost of the Pro wasn't justified just to fix one game but the cost of a XB1X might be justified by fixing one game and opening up a different platform of games to experience (e.g. Subnautica, although that is now coming PS).
Click to expand...

Speaking of PC, I have entertained the idea of upgrading my laptop, and if I did, I could spend a little extra to make it a gaming laptop. It would definitely not be high-end, but I've read that ED works well on lower end systems as well. One thing PC gives us that consoles doesn't is a vast menu of configuration options. I'd happily trade some LOD for better shadows. A lot of the time when I see LOD "pop" to higher quality on my PS4, I think, "It looked fine to me before the pop-in."

HOWEVER, this won't be happening soon, and it doesn't let Lloyd's Loyal Lackies* off the hook to "Make Elite Dangerous Great Again" on standard PS4. David Braben was able to get the original Elite to work on my old C64, so there is just no excuse.

* I'm trying to be funny, not disrespectful
 

krylite

krylite
I looked over some of your shadows pics in your bug report Duck. Aside from the video with the shadows flickering on the outpost "silos" those shadows generally look fine to me. On my pc laptop , I see maybe a little flickering and fuzzy shadows on 'low' setting, then setting on medium stops all the flickering. Of course I've never been a stickler for shadows in a game where I usually set my ED's shadows to 'low'. Maybe with Beyond , the shadows play with some of the new ambient or diffusing effects of lighting in general where FD mentioned they were aiming to improve.

Here's some pics I took of my Krait near a sun. How does it look to you? Maybe I'll check out how the shadows look on my cutter /w curved surfaces later.

QenHbGr.jpg
 
Last edited:

Old Duck

Old Duck
krylite said:
I looked over some of your shadows pics in your bug report Duck. Aside from the video with the shadows flickering on the outpost "silos" those shadows generally look fine to me. On my pc laptop , I see maybe a little flickering and fuzzy shadows on 'low' setting, then setting on medium stops all the flickering. Of course I've never been a stickler for shadows in a game where I usually set my ED's shadows to 'low'. Maybe with Beyond , the shadows play with some of the new ambient or diffusing effects of lighting in general where FD mentioned they were aiming to improve.

Here's some pics I took of my Krait near a sun. How does it look to you? Maybe I'll check out how the shadows look on my cutter /w curved surfaces later.
Click to expand...

Those images you provide look fine to me. Now compare those images to the image in my signature. This specific cockpit bug "kicks in" when entering orbital cruise / glide and persists for the duration of flying over the planet. It's not just the "butt leather", but the moire pattern, as seen here:

[video=youtube_share;JPXVn1CcMl8]https://youtu.be/JPXVn1CcMl8[/video]

Please note that YouTube compression "takes the edge" off the harshness of this effect. This shader issue can also be seen on the surface of my ships, though the rounded ones are much more noticeable:

[video=youtube_share;PMeSwYjIVdU]https://youtu.be/PMeSwYjIVdU[/video]

Again, this looks worse on the game itself at 1080p on a nice display. Please note that this was not always the case, as the game used to look surprisingly amazing on PS4 Slim when it first came out.

Here's another example of how bad cast shadows look, especially when motion is involved:

[video=youtube_share;92hXh2vqgU0]https://youtu.be/92hXh2vqgU0[/video]

and

[video=youtube_share;jDeWNNTp12g]https://youtu.be/jDeWNNTp12g[/video]

and here on ground objects:

[video=youtube_share;QpNjYnviL6I]https://youtu.be/QpNjYnviL6I[/video]

It didn't used to be this way. Graphics quality started to fall when our first major update (2.4) was released, and it's gone downhill ever since. The fact that it used to look good, and QA confirmed many months ago that it's an issue they have enough data on, tells me that it can look good again. So I hope you are right about the new lighting model fixing this.

ps - I told Frontier that I'd prefer no shadows over these flickering "Yars' Revenge" shadows. Unfortunately console gamers don't get any control over the quality of the shadows like PC gamers do.
 
Last edited:

Avago Earo

Banned
Avago Earo
Since I moved to VR, i had to turn the shadows down for my system to handle it. They are awful on outposts; flickering and darting all over the place with weird edges. So it's not a PS4 thing.
 

Old Duck

Old Duck
Avago Earo said:
Since I moved to VR, i had to turn the shadows down for my system to handle it. They are awful on outposts; flickering and darting all over the place with weird edges. So it's not a PS4 thing.
Click to expand...

Interesting... This is with the "low" setting? Does the flickering stop at the "medium" setting? How much of a performance hit do you take by bumping up the shadows quality?

I don't mind soft shadows, but this dancing and flickering is crazy (bad shader code IMO). It's weird because on the PS4 Pro, which really isn't that much more powerful than the Slim, the shadows are very sharp, implying they are on the highest setting in quality mode, so I really don't understand why Frontier would opt for the very lowest setting on the Slim, especially when I often see 60 fps. Speaking of quality mode, when the PS4 Pro is in performance mode, it too suffers from these awful shadows. This makes me think that Frontier basically defaults the PS4 Slim to the Pro's performance mode, which is lazy IMO, because I'd be much happier with medium shadows at 30 fps than these dancing devils at 60 fps.

Oh how I wish Frontier would give us console owners an "advanced" submenu in our graphics settings to let us make these decisions ourselves. There are other games that do this, so why not?
 

Avago Earo

Banned
Avago Earo
Old Duck said:
Interesting... This is with the "low" setting? Does the flickering stop at the "medium" setting? How much of a performance hit do you take by bumping up the shadows quality?
Click to expand...

There's anomalies (if that's the right word) in 'Medium' too. When I turn shadows off the interior of stations is very dark, but in my case I need to push frames for VR. There is smoother movement with shadows off, but this is running a Lenovo Explorer with 970 and i5 4th Gen 4460 (3.2 Ghz), so I'm really making my PC sweat anyway.
 

Old Duck

Old Duck
Avago Earo said:
There's anomalies (if that's the right word) in 'Medium' too. When I turn shadows off the interior of stations is very dark, but in my case I need to push frames for VR. There is smoother movement with shadows off, but this is running a Lenovo Explorer with 970 and i5 4th Gen 4460 (3.2 Ghz), so I'm really making my PC sweat anyway.
Click to expand...

Wait, you need to set shadows to "High" in order to make the flickering and dancing stop? That's just broken! Why am I the only one complaining about this? I guess everyone playing Elite either has a PS4 Pro, XBox1X, or high-end PC, well except for you and me.
 

Latent Buzzard

L
*sigh* I switched back to my PS4 account to knock out some of the Guardian grind on there and now all I can notice is shimmering shadows when I'm driving around. Thanks Duck.
 

CMDR Lukas Vance

CMDR Lukas Vance
Old Duck said:
Wait, you need to set shadows to "High" in order to make the flickering and dancing stop? That's just broken! Why am I the only one complaining about this? I guess everyone playing Elite either has a PS4 Pro, XBox1X, or high-end PC, well except for you and me.
Click to expand...

…or they’re sat 10ft away from the TV drinking beer and watching Netflix on a second screen…
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom