Regarding the prototype light balances, I've found a rather annoying side effect of disabling it. Certain effects that are supposed to glow do not, namely I went to "Radioactive Green" and the dark side of the gas giant was totaly black. Reenabling prototype lighting balances corrected this.
I've been waiting for Frontier to fix this issue since EDH (and possibly ED V1.0x i.e.2014) went live..
Last time I checked it was still there no matter the prototype light balance mode.
You don't happen to have a cure for this at hand do you?
A little more info on this, unjustified IMHO for a game of this magnitude and current game tech, little bug:
The steps to reproduce this bug are somewhat exceptional & unique:
1. You have to find 2 planetary bodies where at least one of which must be landable i.e. without atmosphere.
2. The 2 bodies must be close enough to be rendered as 3d spheres with subsequent texture loading taking place i.e. not too far away so that the far away one is rendered as a point source.
3. The 2 bodies must not be eclipsing each other - this is obvious .
4. You must place your ship in one's shadow and have in view the landable i.e. non atmospheric one. The bug only occurs on non atmospheric planets.
5. If both bodies are landable and you land on the night side of the 1st and have in view the other one (which is not eclipsed by the 1st), you will notice very weird illumination on the 2nd. It will not be totally dark but neither properly lit.
I've been waiting for Frontier to fix this issue since EDH (and possibly ED V1.0x i.e.2014) went live..
Last time I checked it was still there no matter the prototype light balance mode.
You don't happen to have a cure for this at hand do you?
The game has dynamic exposure compensation, depending on ambient light conditions. Some of the magnitude of this is indirectly adjustable, but I haven't seen any way to disable it or control where it's applied.
This will be the biggest update to my shadow frustums in a while. I recently acquired some white paint for my CMDR's Mamba which makes a lot of near-surface geometry visible as shadow acne. Had to make a few hard choices between keeping peter panning to an absolute minimum, or eliminating as much shadow acne as practical and ensuring that transitions between shadow cascades were as seamless as possible...I went with the latter. This involved tweaking many of the depth slope biases and offsets again, generally upwards. I've also increased some of the frustum end distances slightly, to push out shadows, as far as good quality can be maintained, with my current number of frustums.
Though this is a move in the opposite direction of my last few significant updates, I believe it's an overall better balance and I was still able to keep the frequency of peter panning (detached/floating) shadows acceptably low (and significantly reduced from default).
As usual, this should be pasted over whichever shadow detail setting you wish to replace in your GraphicsConfiguration.xml. As these changes add at least two frustums above and beyond those that exist in any of the default profiles, placing this in the override file will not work correctly...there is no Frustum6, Frustum7, or Frustum8 to override, even on ultra.
Optionally, one can download the config file I've attached to this post, rename the file to remove everything after ".xml" and paste it over the game's copy. Reverting the file to stock is as easy as having the launcher verify game files. Note that the attached file replaces the game's LOW detail shadows with mine, to make comparisons with the default higher quality settings easier.
The image encoding/file format is not the issue. Evidently the point from which the frame is grabbed is before the filter is applied, at least with any software I've used to grab images. It's possible NVIDIA's GFE or Ansel could capture the effect, but I have no intention of installing GFE.
Also, I played around with the lighting and tone mapping a bit more. I tested a much older tone map I pulled out of a back up dating back to 1.3 and compared it with both a linear map (ToneMapType=0) and the current defaults. In the end I left it at the default tone map, but pulled the Percentiles entry (if it did anything it was too subtle to be clear, even when comparing screenshots), and turned down GlareCompensation further, to 0.75.
Here is my complete GraphicsConfigurationOverride.xml, so you can see everything I've adjusted to my personal tastes (both for IQ and performance):
Using these shadow settings, and generally liking them. Especially the almost total elimination of flickering shadows when approaching a planet surface & on the surface.
But one thing looks worse with these settings than with default ultra shadows: SRV's own shadow on planet surface.
This is E: D default Ultra shadows:
and this is Morbad's latest (from quoted post):
I wonder what settings causes the blurriness and if making the shadow sharper has some other, maybe unfortunate, effects?
That's controlled by the "Profile_PlanetSurface" entries and the reason mine are softer is partially deliberate (a slightly larger filter kernel) and partially a side effect of having more cascades very close together and having them fade into each other to make shadow transitions smoother (especially noticeable around structures when the sun is low in the sky).
It can probably be sharpened up without many downsides, if you prefer.
Open GraphicsConfiguration.xml in any text editor that won't mangle the formatting (I use Notepad++, but regular Windows' Notepad will work fine as long as word wrap is off), find the shadow quality profile you want to change (if you're using my file it's "Shadows_Low"), then find "Profile_PlanetSurface", then "Frustum0" and "Frustum1". Change the "<FilterKernelSize>3</FilterKernelSize>" entry (just the number) to "1" for Frustum 0 and "2" for Frustum 1. See if that is an improvement.
Edit: Doing some testing on this now, will see if it can be sharpened up without breaking anything.
Edit2: Fixed it by tuning filter kernel sizes. Should look sharper than default ultra without any significant side effects. Running some tests now and will include these adjustments with a few others I've been working on when I post my next revision shortly.
Alright, I've altered the FilterKernelSize on nearly all frustums of all profiles, except where the cockpit is concerned (sharpening them causes some blending issues and they don't really benefit from it anyway), adjusted shader biases, and further tuned a few depth bias/slope settings.
For anyone not familiar with the drill, please reference the OP and post #137 for intructions.
As usual, file is attached below, but here are the relevant contents for review:
I'm also attaching my custom GraphicsConfigurationOverride.xmls which contain tweaks to AO (more intense), bloom (less intense), texture resolutions (higher with more detailed reflections), and the skybox (more milky way detail, but lower brightness and many more stars visible). These are not required to use the shadow changes in the main GraphicsConfiguration.xml, nor vice versa. There are two override files: the +PLB assumes one wants to continue to use the new lighting system introduced in 3.3; the NoPLB file disables these changes as much as is practical and makes futher bloom/glare adjustments to compensate.
Alright, I've altered the FilterKernelSize on nearly all frustums of all profiles, except where the cockpit is concerned (sharpening them causes some blending issues and they don't really benefit from it anyway), adjusted shader biases, and further tuned a few depth bias/slope settings.
For anyone not familiar with the drill, please reference the OP and post #137 for intructions.
As usual, file is attached below, but here are the relevant contents for review:
I'm also attaching my custom GraphicsConfigurationOverride.xmls which contain tweaks to AO (more intense), bloom (less intense), texture resolutions (higher with more detailed reflections), and the skybox (more milky way detail, but lower brightness and many more stars visible). These are not required to use the shadow changes in the main GraphicsConfiguration.xml, nor vice versa. There are two override files: the +PLB assumes one wants to continue to use the new lighting system introduced in 3.3; the NoPLB file disables these changes as much as is practical and makes futher bloom/glare adjustments to compensate.
Noticed a problem with disabling lens flares in my override...it makes PA fire essentially invisible. Since there have been bugs with this is the past I didn't connect some recent unusual difficulties in dodging plasma with my graphics settings until I switched back to a ship with PAs and started shooting stuff myself.
Dot I circled in green looks almost indistinguishable from a star, but is actually a PA shot:
Finally figured out what the "TexelStability" setting does. It appears to be a texel snapping setting used to control shimmer.
The default setting was switched to "2" back in 2.3, which fixed some fairly extreme artifacting where where the cascades became visible as a shadowy square that rotated with the viewport. However, this setting also introduced a huge amount of shimmer/flicker on shadow edges, especially at very shallow lighting angles.
My posted profiles thus far are using the default "2" setting and compensate for most, but no where near all, shimmer with an increased shadow slice size, wider filter kernel (until the latest incarnation), and fairly extreme depth/slope bias in certain locations.
I've been experimenting with the other settings and "0" is a huge improvement in many scenarios and allows for floating shadows to be all but eliminated from terrain beyond a moderate distance with much reduced flicker...but where it doesn't work, it really doesn't work. Namely, if the sun is low in the sky, it can look like a mobile square ocean of black shadow with islands of terrain poking through, or other make the geometry of the cascade boundry box readily apparent.
I'm not exactly sure what the setting of "1" is doing, but it seems to be the absolute worst combination of "0" and "2".
As it stands, I think I'll need to keep the current <TexelStability>2<TexelStability> setting and find some other way to further mitigate shimmer. I might try radically increasing slice size, or forcing supersampling transparency AA via the drivers to see if that achieves an acceptable effect. There will almost certainly be a performance hit though, especially with the later option.
Turns out I was also mistaken about the maximum shadow cascade distance. I had figured they introduced a cap at some point, but it turns out that the geometry I was using for reference was the issue.
Some past versions of the game had shadow cascades that go out to 100km.
Edit: I do believe there is a cap not far beyond the 10km I've been using, but the precise figure is proving illusive.
Alright, I've altered the FilterKernelSize on nearly all frustums of all profiles, except where the cockpit is concerned (sharpening them causes some blending issues and they don't really benefit from it anyway), adjusted shader biases, and further tuned a few depth bias/slope settings.
For anyone not familiar with the drill, please reference the OP and post #137 for intructions.
As usual, file is attached below, but here are the relevant contents for review:
I'm also attaching my custom GraphicsConfigurationOverride.xmls which contain tweaks to AO (more intense), bloom (less intense), texture resolutions (higher with more detailed reflections), and the skybox (more milky way detail, but lower brightness and many more stars visible). These are not required to use the shadow changes in the main GraphicsConfiguration.xml, nor vice versa. There are two override files: the +PLB assumes one wants to continue to use the new lighting system introduced in 3.3; the NoPLB file disables these changes as much as is practical and makes futher bloom/glare adjustments to compensate.
Dear Morbad can i use those settings in VR to improve visuals/quailty ? Please advice ? also everytime an update is receive through FD do i have to replace them ?
Dear Morbad can i use those settings in VR to improve visuals/quailty ? Please advice ? also everytime an update is receive through FD do i have to replace them ?
The shadow profile changes I've made to the core GraphicsConfiguration.xml should be broadly better than the default Ultra preset for pretty much any system/display that is capable of running the Ultra preset, including VR HMDs.
Since this file resides in the game's main directory, it will be replaced any time the game file integrity is verified and anytime there is a patch. You should simply be able to drag and drop the modified file over the default and replace it. However, Steam may have other integrity checks and may require that GraphicsConfiguration.xml be set to read-only after you replace the default with the modified one. You would then have to manually delete it and allow the launcher to verify integrity if you wish to restore defaults.
Also, do remember to set shadows to "Low" if you are using the files I've posted, as I've replaced that preset rather than Ultra, for comparison purposes.
Dear Morbad can i use those settings in VR to improve visuals/quailty ? Please advice ? also everytime an update is receive through FD do i have to replace them ?
Also, do remember to set shadows to "Low" if you are using the files I've posted, as I've replaced that preset rather than Ultra, for comparison purposes.
Or you could use my GraphicsConfiguration.xml which has Morbads modification as the ultra setting and every other default setting has been moved one step lower, i.e. default ultra is now default high, default high is default medium and default medium is default low. There is no default low.
I believe it is fair and makes more sense to use it this way .
PS: For the overdrive please change galaxybackground to somethng less than 4096 especially if you are around nebulae or your GPU has less than 8gigs of dedicated VRAM.
Referencing some older GraphicsConfiguration.xml files and excluding any obviously incongruous entries, I've been recalibrating my frustum EndDistances to account for the 12.8km limit I keep seeing, which does seem valid.
Some examples of my current (unreleased) profiles, including some issues to still be resolved at very shallow lighting angles (a bit more info in the video descriptions):
I will probably have a new set of shadow cascades to upload today with improvements to the frustum distances, but I doubt I will be able to resolve the issues demonstrated in those ~1 and ~5 degree examples.
I think you have reached the limit of the cobra engine's capabilities. Very good job and very informative, illustrative & descriptive videos. Can't wait to try your new cascades .
That's what I thought when I started this thread, but I'm constantly rediscovering things.
At this point, I have one more conventional solution to try then I will have to attempt to learn how the game's adaptive cascade system works and hope that it can be adapted to further mitigate these issues with the PlanetApproach profile. Frontier pulled adaptive cascades quite a while back when it was causing shadow acne/flicker in some cockpit shadows, but I think I'd be able to work around that, and I recently came across some old GraphicsConfiguration.xmls (one of my ancient backups and one I found on-line from a little later) that probably have enough of the variables I need to reference for me to start piecing things together.
Anyway, any radical change like that will have to wait a while. This next profile will probably be my last before the 3.6 beta.
On a mostly unrelated tangent, I've also been playing around with the override some more and I don't think the first HDRNode section is being parsed at all, only HDRNode_Reference seems to be working.
Question for Morbad. I've just tried your latest xml files. Reading your comments, you say to put Shadow level to 'LOW' to take effect, is that correct?
Asking because when I select LOW, the shadows look like, well, a bit rubbish. Flickery and 'poppy', particularly on Coriolis stations. If I select ULTRA, then they look good.
Question for Morbad. I've just tried your latest xml files. Reading your comments, you say to put Shadow level to 'LOW' to take effect, is that correct?
Asking because when I select LOW, the shadows look like, well, a bit rubbish. Flickery and 'poppy', particularly on Coriolis stations. If I select ULTRA, then they look good.
.
