Shadow draw distance

[Irios]

Why is the draw distance on shadows set so incredibly short?

As an example, just look straight down on the first campaign map, and zoom all the way back. Or just look down at the ground at 45 degree'ish (normal view point, I guess), and you'll see that the shadows stop rendering not even half way into the landscape.

This is not a game where you spend most of the time zoomed in to look at the details. I'm gonna guess the majority of players will be zoomed out all the way. Why even have shadows on objects in the landscape when they won't even render most of the time. It just makes it look incredibly ugly when moving your camera around the landscape, and distracts from the overall gameplay.

Please either increase the distance significantly, or give us a setting to adjust this ourselves.

 

[Vick]

I have faith in Frontier to improve this later on, but yes, it is indeed considerably worse than the first one in this regard.

As of now they are worse on PC/PS5/SeriesX than they were on JWE on PS4 and XboxOne, and that doesn't really make much sense.

 

[Jens Erik]

Hello! Thank you both for the feedback. We will let the team know about this.

 

[Jesper]

I got the game today and the first thing I noticed was the shadows of the textures popping in when you zoom in or get closer to an object. Very distracting. I wish frontier would have chosen for less detailed textures/shadows I stead of eliminating the complete shadow of an object.

I really hope they fix this in an update. Or even give me an option in the settings menu to disable the shadows. I rather disable the shadows than have them popping in and out very obviously.

 

[PCMR4Life]

The draw distance needs to be fixed or give us a setting. I noticed it also seems to be a square or box. Just watch next time you play, and you will see that everything is rendered in a square or something. It's really weird. I think it's a performance thing. They probably did it to help with performance, especially on older consoles. Which from what I have heard already have performance issues that are pretty bad.

I would say a draw distance setting would be better. Just let us choose for ourselves at least on PC. On consoles they might be stuck.

 

[Skawt]

Not sure if anyone has noticed, but this same issue applies to building lights as well. It's weird.

 

[Nioell]

Not sure if anyone has noticed, but this same issue applies to building lights as well. It's weird.

It's annoying is what it is...you can fix the shadows by changing the games config settings in the files on PC at least, stumbled upon a post about that in the Steam discussions and it works great. Sadly it doesn't seem to fix the lights as well, so that's still an issue >.>

 

[BJD1988]

Major immersionbreaker

 

[Jesper]

Maybe we need to put this issue as a reply underneath their Facebook messages so they notice it and can start working on it. At the moment I don't have the idea Frontier is doing anything about it.

I have the PS5 version of the game and it doesn't feel like a PS5 version at all

 

[Nirazul]

@frontier dev.

perhaps it helps, to fix our day 1 Shadow Draw distance problem.
On Pc you can make it better:

Found it with the help of google

 

[Vick]

Something's extremely weird about shadow draw distance.
At least in Nublar 2015 after the latest patch, people shadows, big trees, buildings, individually placed trees and bushes etc. are actually perfect, and this is true also on PS5, they never disappear even at max distance except for those casted by people, which are still rendered MUCH further than in 99% games on the market.

The problem lies specifically in herbivore food trees/palm trees appearing via Foliage brush, in these cases shadows immediately disapper just like they did at lauch. I placed something like 400 individual trees or even more (with perfect shadows) in a super-busy and ultra dense park with tons of decorations and the game ran perfectly, so i really don't get why this is the case.

 

[Nirazul]

Will we have the option, to choose the Shadow Draw Distance in the next update?(Pc)

 

[HeatherG]

Will we have the option, to choose the Shadow Draw Distance in the next update?(Pc)

That's not something they can answer. We won't know until the path notes are announced.
Please don't ask just to bump it. I've already deleted one.

 

[Jens Erik]

Will we have the option, to choose the Shadow Draw Distance in the next update?(Pc)

I don't have anything to announce about selectable Shadow Draw Distance in the next update.

 

[Jurassic_DX]

I don't have anything to announce about selectable Shadow Draw Distance in the next update.

Understood, but can you pass this onto the dev team that this remains a high demand from the community? I understand console limitations, but selectable options would allow for more flexibility and help alleviate this for PC players. We'd appreciate it Jens.

 

[MysteriousStranger]

I don't have anything to announce about selectable Shadow Draw Distance in the next update.

I just got it off of Game Pass, and honestly its the first thing you notice when you load into the campaign, messing with all the settings doesn't help it, and so it leads me to believe this has been an issue since launch (in game config files).

This is totally immersion breaking and absolutely distracting, especially since its happening right in front of your face. There doesn't even have to be an option for Shadow Draw Distance, just tell one of the devs to go into settings and increase the LOD values for shadows/cascades etc and send out the hotfix and be done with it.

The other thing is how has nobody on the dev team even realized this is an issue? (assuming at this point post launch) I can't imagine any of the devs working on this game being content with what's constantly happening right in front of their face.

Erik please push this issue through ASAP for the community.

 

[Jens Erik]

Thank you both for your feedback, I have shared this with the team

 

[Skawt]

Thank you both for your feedback, I have shared this with the team

Thank you Jens. Please don't forget this issue affects lighting distance as well. I do a lot of playing at night for the atmosphere, and this is just as cringe as the shadow draw in the day time.

At the very least, I would suggest adding a toggle to change it if performance is a concern.