Hello developers at Frontier. As I'm sure you know, I'm dissatisfied with the current shadow quality on the PS4, but I might have a solution for at least certain assets like orbital and planetary outposts, terrain self-shadowing, etc.
Many games, No Man's Sky and Elder Scrolls Online being two examples that come to mind, use prerendered shadows for their static objects (building, trees, etc). The sun still moves in these games, so high-quality shadows seem to be generated every few seconds in a separate thread, resulting in a "stair-step" movement when one looks closely at them. Elite Dangerous appears to use per-frame dynamic shadow rendering, which makes shadows fluid in motion but very low quality on lower-spec hardware like PS4 Slim.
The irony is that the length of a day on many planets in ED are way, way longer than NMS an ESO, so you could easily use prerendered shadows most planetary bases, terrain, even orbital outposts and non-moving parts of megaships, and still avoid visible stair-step shadow movement. This would allow for much higher quality 'static' shadows while freeing up the GPU to focus on dynamic shadows those cast by our ship / SRV (thus improving ALL shadows and self-shading in the process).
Because as things currently stand, the shadows in No Man's Sky look way better on a base PS4 / Slim than ED's shadows, even though ED strives to be the more realistic looking of the two games. Lighting and shading are crucial in defining a realistic-looking scene, so their quality should be treated as a priority.
ps - if people on higher-end machines don't want this, it could be an option in the settings, which I've seen in other games on PC in the past.
I do appreciate you considering this optimization. Thank you, Frontier!!!
Many games, No Man's Sky and Elder Scrolls Online being two examples that come to mind, use prerendered shadows for their static objects (building, trees, etc). The sun still moves in these games, so high-quality shadows seem to be generated every few seconds in a separate thread, resulting in a "stair-step" movement when one looks closely at them. Elite Dangerous appears to use per-frame dynamic shadow rendering, which makes shadows fluid in motion but very low quality on lower-spec hardware like PS4 Slim.
The irony is that the length of a day on many planets in ED are way, way longer than NMS an ESO, so you could easily use prerendered shadows most planetary bases, terrain, even orbital outposts and non-moving parts of megaships, and still avoid visible stair-step shadow movement. This would allow for much higher quality 'static' shadows while freeing up the GPU to focus on dynamic shadows those cast by our ship / SRV (thus improving ALL shadows and self-shading in the process).
Because as things currently stand, the shadows in No Man's Sky look way better on a base PS4 / Slim than ED's shadows, even though ED strives to be the more realistic looking of the two games. Lighting and shading are crucial in defining a realistic-looking scene, so their quality should be treated as a priority.
ps - if people on higher-end machines don't want this, it could be an option in the settings, which I've seen in other games on PC in the past.
I do appreciate you considering this optimization. Thank you, Frontier!!!