Another Elephant Butt Leather Thread...

[JonesTheFilm]

Just on the PS5 thing...

I'm not too worried about ED & the PS5 as Sony have already confirmed PS5 to be backwards compatible with PS4 games. They decided to keep the new console's system architecture essentially the same (but with newer better components of course) largely in order to ease the learning curve for developers but also to ease their manufacturing process - a side effect being that backwards compatibility is almost a freebie. If anything ED should run better on PS5 as it should act something like a 'PS4 Pro Plus'.

On the EBL & DDS thing ...

TLDR: ED is a PC game that's been ported to the PS4, it's never going to look as good as a PS4 exclusive/focused game, like HZD for example, and FD are unlikely to make really good looking PS games while they're using Cobra.

This is from FD's own tech page on their Cobra engine:

This engine allows the game teams to develop and debug their titles primarily on PC, without the need to concern themselves with the technical details of the individual target platforms unless necessary. It also makes for clean, structured code where the game logic only needs one set of verification at the beta stage of the project, greatly reducing the amount of testing time required for additional platform versions of a game.

(My emphasis)

The phrase "unless necessary" allows that they do engage in some separate development/optimisation for different platforms but I'm willing to bet it's not as in-depth as it could be and it's obviously not going to be as good as a more PS4 focused, or dedicated PS4 developer.

Of course the PS4 isn't going to stand up technically with the high-end gaming rigs many ED players use, but it'll compare well to a lot of the more mid-range rigs many people still have and I bet they still have a better graphical experience than the PS4 players.

It's not just about the power of the machine, it's how cleverly you design & code for it to get the best out of it. It's not just about the scope and size of the game, it's about how you manage the assets that are appearing on screen in any one frame. In the end the quality of your game, (or film, or TV show) is defined by the decisions you make about what is acceptable to let on-screen and what isn't. FD seem to have decided that EBL & DDS are flaws they're happy to put up with.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

You know what EBL is good for? I have found a great use for it:

Wrap the engineers in EBL and the toss it out the airlock in suborbital sun orbit.

 

[Old Duck]

FD seem to have decided that EBL & DDS are flaws they're happy to put up with.

I've been here since before ED released on PS4, and I've seen evidence (albeit circumstantial) that Frontier was invested in the PS4 during the initial development and release of the game. At the time they had a dedicated team and responsive team leader who worked hard to make ED a pretty good looking game on PS4. Shadows were not always the horrible mess they are now - that "upgrade" came later. Once the team ironed out the initial bugs, Frontier's zeal for the platform slowly waned. Each update brought graphical bugs and glitches, and Frontier's response to these became less and less "we care" over time. Fast forward to today, where the project leader is gone (working on Planet Coaster) and the PS4 forum and threads like this are completely ignored by developers. I really don't think there is a PS4 team at Frontier anymore, not one active with ED pre-'New Era' anyway.

Regarding Cobra, I think they did a good job tuning it to the content we had in 2.3, but when 2.4 dropped, the PS4 Cobra engine failed to properly scale with those changes, thus the initial "minecraft texture" bug we were hit with, later followed by dancing disco shadows, and then the final insult of elephant butt leather cockpit shadows. Unfortunately nobody remains at Frontier who knows how or cares to retune the Cobra engine to fix these things. That's why despite my persistence in bringing up this topic, I have zero hope of it ever being fixed. Which is a shame, as it has killed any customer loyalty I might have once had to Frontier.

ps - You'll notice that these days that I mostly compare ED to other cross-platform games on the PS4, games like RDR2, NMS, TR, etc. I do understand that it might not be fair to compare ED to Sony exclusives like Spider-Man, HZD, GoW, Uncharted, since these will be built from the ground-up specifically for the Playstation. But neither Lara Croft nor Arthur Morgan are impressed with the shadow quality in Elite Dangerous!

 

[hems303]

I don't want to worry you, but the EBL aside, those same shadow artefacts from your first video are quite clear on my pc at times as well. (in Elite, not other games)

Yup! Old Duck I'm afraid that I can confirm the above.... it's NOT just PS4 with flickering ''Dancing Disco Shadows''. I have had my bleeding edge ''specifically built for ED'' PC... for many months and have fiddled with all quality settings....see specs below in sig... and on occasions I get the same problem... it's ED/FDEV not your rig... though it does seem worse on the PS4 for sure!!!!!!! o7

 

[JonesTheFilm]

It's not something I'm usually a fan of, because one point of consoles is their plug-and-play simplicity, but some games are a good argument for having graphics settings on console. ED is one of them. There are very differing play styles available in ED and the type of graphics performance you want might be different depending on play style. The simplest example is a combat-focused player will likely favour frame rate over pretty graphics and a deep space explorer might happily accept a frame rate drop to get nicer views.

 

[Old Duck]

Yup! Old Duck I'm afraid that I can confirm the above.... it's NOT just PS4 with flickering ''Dancing Disco Shadows''. I have had my bleeding edge ''specifically built for ED'' PC... for many months and have fiddled with all quality settings....see specs below in sig... and on occasions I get the same problem... it's ED/FDEV not your rig... though it does seem worse on the PS4 for sure!!!!!!! o7

Seriously? You folks are way more tolerant than I am if this is the case! Well this gives me something to think about when it comes to a potential move to PC with ED in mind... If I paid a ton of money for a gaming rig and still had to deal with rubbish shadows, I'd flip my lid!

Out of curiosity, have you tried Morbad's custom shadow files?

 

[hems303]

Seriously? You folks are way more tolerant than I am if this is the case! Well this gives me something to think about when it comes to a potential move to PC with ED in mind... If I paid a ton of money for a gaming rig and still had to deal with rubbish shadows, I'd flip my lid!

Out of curiosity, have you tried Morbad's custom shadow files?

Hi Old Duck
The shadow problems are merely marginal on my PC and certainly only very occasional.... not as prevalent as in your case, but you should know that if you are migrating to PC your current ''problems'' are still NOT unheard of on PC. I haven't tried Morbad's shadow files as yet. o7

 

[Old Duck]

Are you seeing these problems in certain specific situations; for example, planet surfaces?

I never understood why Frontier uses fast-updating dynamic shadows on planets with long day cycles. Most games use a more static shadow system that updates every 10 seconds or even every minute. Yes, this can create a bit of "tic toc" shadow movement at sunset, but it looks way better than these dancing dynamic shadows. IMO dynamic shadows should be reserved for moving objects only. Using them everywhere seems lazy to me.

And yes, we can get rid of the dozens of 20th century spinning radar dishes on every single landing pad tower. All the radar signals bouncing around these stations is cooking my microwave popcorn before I'm ready to eat it! (One more source of dynamic shadows eliminated.)

 

[Morbad]

The shadows are awful on PC (VR) as well. I think only 'Ultra' setting eliminates the bad completely but (butt) performance takes a dive into Charlie Chaplin frame rate territory and combat in a res site; talking frames per minute.

Most of the performance hit from the ultra shadow setting in rings is due to "AsteroidShadowsEnabled". Setting this to zero can double framerate on some hardware. Not all setups are harmed by asteroid shadows (there is almost no performance hit on my 1080 Ti, for example), but many older/less potent parts are heavily impacted by this setting

Many other aspects of shadows can be improved far beyond Frontier's 'ultra' quality preset with a fairly minimal performance hit.

Has this always been the case? And surely it's not as bad as on PS4. Look at all the videos I posted, these are truly HORRIBLE shadows. Frontier would have been further ahead to just disable shadows completely....

In some areas, most of the PC presets are really bad and I would be surprised if they tuned the consoles significantly differently from the medium/high PC presets.

Seriously? You folks are way more tolerant than I am if this is the case! Well this gives me something to think about when it comes to a potential move to PC with ED in mind... If I paid a ton of money for a gaming rig and still had to deal with rubbish shadows, I'd flip my lid!

I wrote my shadow profiles (and my previous SSAO tweaks) precisely because I found it absurd that I had to deal with rubbish shadows.

As Ian mentions, ED works at a range of scales that makes traditional shadow rendering techniques very difficult and there are somethings that just aren't going to be fixed to satisfaction without a radical overhaul in how the game handles shadows.

I can still fix almost all of the flicker and most of the ugliest moderate range shadows. It is disappointing that I had to though.

I never understood why Frontier uses fast-updating dynamic shadows on planets with long day cycles. Most games use a more static shadow system that updates every 10 seconds or even every minute. Yes, this can create a bit of "tic toc" shadow movement at sunset, but it looks way better than these dancing dynamic shadows. IMO dynamic shadows should be reserved for moving objects only. Using them everywhere seems lazy to me.

There are a lot of places where static shadows would look extremely out of place. Imagine a rapidly orbiting planet or moon (the 'planet of death' would be one of the more extreme examples of this) that could cover several degrees of it's perigee a minute and how dramatic the difference between each tic of a static render would be.

 

[Old Duck]

I can still fix almost all of the flicker and most of the ugliest moderate range shadows. It is disappointing that I had to though.

And this was with minimum hit to performance, yes?

There are a lot of places where static shadows would look extremely out of place. Imagine a rapidly orbiting planet or moon (the 'planet of death' would be one of the more extreme examples of this) that could cover several degrees of it's perigee a minute and how dramatic the difference between each tic of a static render would be.

I get that, but surely Frontier could easily chose between shadow renderers based on predictable rate-of-change. For every fast-moving orbital there are 100 very slow (based on shadow differential) orbitals. In fact, they could dynamically scale the shadow detail and update rate based on how fast shadows are "moving" across a scene like a planetary base at sunset. Other games do all sorts of "visual tricks" like this, especially on consoles where you can't just keep throwing more GPU at a problem.

I still feel Frontier's approach to graphics is a bit "lazy", especially when looking at the clever programming behind games like Horizon Zero Dawn. It's hard to believe Frontier is David Braben's company, the same man who is known for his "clever graphics tricks" in the original 1984 Elite. The one area I don't feel this way is planet surface rendering, which is actually pretty darn impressive IMO, even on the humble console.

 

[Morbad]

And this was with minimum hit to performance, yes?

Yes, and if I was really stingy, I could do most of it with a performance improvement.

I still feel Frontier's approach to graphics is a bit "lazy"

I concur.

The one area I don't feel this way is planet surface rendering, which is actually pretty darn impressive IMO, even on the humble console.

I have mixed feelings about the planet surfaces.

The old 2.0-2.1 planet renders was much more geometry heavy and while this was more demanding, it also generally looked better than the later implementation that removed geomety anywhere that texturing could plausibly replace it. Still looks pretty good, and runs much better on the same hardware, but as my hardware gets faster and faster, I find myself missing the geometry heavy version.

 

[Viajero]

ps - You'll notice that these days that I mostly compare ED to other cross-platform games on the PS4, games like RDR2, NMS, TR, etc. I do understand that it might not be fair to compare ED to Sony exclusives like Spider-Man, HZD, GoW, Uncharted, since these will be built from the ground-up specifically for the Playstation. But neither Lara Croft nor Arthur Morgan are impressed with the shadow quality in Elite Dangerous!

Some of those cross platform games you mentioned have their serious fair share of bugs including graphical glitches and many game blocking bugs aswell etc. some of them went unadressed by their respective devs for months or more. But I truly hope we do not turn this thread into a bug post/link contest. Btw, RDR2 is not yet on PC as far as I am aware.

 

[babelfisch]

You rich folk ought donate to the "Old Duck's New Laptop" fund, and then EBL can finally be put to rest

A laptop for ED in 2019

There's a chance that I might come into some extra money later this year. Technically I have money now, but I am VERY frugal. Still, I may be in the market for a new 'power user' laptop, and if I could get something that can play ED for hours at 1920x1080x60fps Ultra quality, well I might...

forums.frontier.co.uk

No. Either you go full master race or I'll not support you.

 

[Enderby]

I forgot for a moment who the "EBL" guy was and then I remembered that it was you Old Duck.

I wish you success with it, old chap.

 

[Old Duck]

No. Either you go full master race or I'll not support you.

I'm not sure what a full master race is, but if you want to ship me one, I'll plug it in and see if my fuse box can handle it!

 

[babelfisch]

I am not sure either, but I heard it's the best. Personally I am just above peasant level with my 5 years old PC...

 

[Old Duck]

Everybody needs to boycott the PS4 version of ED!! That'll force Frontier to fix these shadows!

(Sorry, I was inspired by that Open-only guy.)

 

[Screemonster]

never mind the EBL, is there a campaign for when clipper pilots get BLINDED BY THE LIGHT occasionally

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

Seriously? You folks are way more tolerant than I am if this is the case! Well this gives me something to think about when it comes to a potential move to PC with ED in mind... If I paid a ton of money for a gaming rig and still had to deal with rubbish shadows, I'd flip my lid!

Out of curiosity, have you tried Morbad's custom shadow files?

The issue is seeing shadows from 100s of kilometres away. When up close and personal, the shadows seem to be fine. It's most likely a draw distance issue which most other games don't have an issue with.

 

[Dagwit]

I'm beginning to think that the only way we'll ever see this problem solved is for Old Duck to start a business selling anti-wrinkle cream to elephants.