So about those shadows....
Well, it kinda is.
It's just not two surfaces on top of each other, but a surface and depth image version of the same surface taken from a different direction.
This is a classic case of shadow acne and great example on how shadowmaps are very bad for shadowing large distances with small detail and need lot of tweaking to look good. (Elite .cfg has huge amount of variables depending on where the ship is trying to fix these.)
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/wi...ommon-techniques-to-improve-shadow-depth-maps
Well, I dunno about any of this - all I know is that regular shadows looked fine in 2.3 and then went south almost exactly one year ago (2.4.n update), and the cockpit self-shading looked fine until 3.02, at which point it turned to elephant butt leather. As for .cfg and Microsoft DirectX, these are irreverent on the PS4...
DirectX has nothing to do with shadow quality even on PC. (Link was to display all the bad things possible and why, including acne.)
.cfg comment was to show how much fiddling of settings it is to get them to work in general.
This is example from .CFG on PC of the shadowmap cascade closest to player and the cause of cockpit shadow acne would most likely be one of those values. (On PC that ultra cfg seemed to have 8 cascades, each of them have own sets of values + settings to near planets, asteroids.. etc..)
Simply put, they did some changes which broke the carefully tweaked settings. (Perhaps dropped shadow resolution and suddenly the blurred area is larger than bias and peeks through surfaces..etc.)
Shadow maps are horrible in terms of quality/robustness.
Everything else you posted went over my head (I left PC gaming before shadow maps were a thing). However, I can definitely agree with the quoted text! Whatever the issue, I just want it fixed.[hotas]
ON THIS DAY LAST YEAR, I filled the bug report titled:
Very Poor Shadow Quality (PS4 Slim)
A year has passed, and this problem has only gotten worse with subsequent updates. My one remaining hope is that with Frontier's focus on improving visuals and lighting in the 3.3 update, this issue will finally be fixed...
Very Poor Shadow Quality (PS4 Slim)
A year has passed, and this problem has only gotten worse with subsequent updates. My one remaining hope is that with Frontier's focus on improving visuals and lighting in the 3.3 update, this issue will finally be fixed...
DO NOT hold your breath on this fix Old Duck.......They are overhauling Expedition and have said they are not fixing PS4 cartographics screen
DO NOT hold your breath on this fix Old Duck.......They are overhauling Expedition and have said they are not fixing PS4 cartographics screen
I stopped holding my breath a long time ago - I would have died from asphyxia otherwise
I am, however, holding my purse strings!
Could it be...
An end to Elephant Butt Leather!??!
Well strip off my clothes and dance naked in the streets!!!! Thank you, Frontier, thank you!
(but I'm not changing my signature until I see it with my own eyes)
An end to Elephant Butt Leather!??!
Well strip off my clothes and dance naked in the streets!!!! Thank you, Frontier, thank you!
(but I'm not changing my signature until I see it with my own eyes)
Yeah, I'd wait to tear off the clothes....
stormyuk
Volunteer Moderator
Do you only get the issue in that instance, 'when entering orbital cruise'? I've never seen it tbh but I don't play in performance mode.
Orbital cruise is the "switch" that triggers the EBL effect seen in my signature. It remains throughout the duration of any planetary exploration (flying over surface, on ground, etc). That said, a very recent update caused shaders in general to degrade even in space, though not as bad as EBL. I'm hoping update fixes cockpit / bridge to pre-3.02 update standards, which was fine.
I do a lot of planetary exploration and surface outposts missions, which is why it is such a big deal to me (otherwise I would not have paid extra for Horizons).
Sweet.
Will miss Ducks signature if 3.3 should really provide a fix. Should be replaced by one showing a different bug (flashing shadows/SRV crash?)
I don't care as much about the SRV, but I'll definitely have a new signature for these terrible shadows if they remain in the game.
How does "Epileptic Seizure Shadows" sound? I might need an animated gif for my sig banner to fully get my point across
Dancing lego block shadows?I don't care as much about the SRV, but I'll definitely have a new signature for these terrible shadows if they remain in the game.
How does "Epileptic Seizure Shadows" sound? I might need an animated gif for my sig banner to fully get my point across
Caused by shadow cascade resolution.
Fix being allocating more resolution and/or cascades to shadows. (cost more memory and performance.)
Another way to fix is to change how shadowing works in the game from cascaded shadow maps to something else. (Virtual/sparse shadow maps? ray-traced shadows? etc.)
I really do not expect this to happen though..
Well I don't know about the secret sauce behind the curtain when it comes to shadows, all I know is that I have better looking shadows in some of my Playstation THREE games than I do in ED. I started playing HZD again and paid particular attention to how Decima handles shadows. Up close, shadows are just as sharp on my Slim as they are in ED on a Pro-only. As you move away from an object, they gradually become more blurry, but they never "wobble" or flicker. In fact, I don't even usually think about shadows or LOD when playing HZD, because the overall presentation is so immersive and beautiful that I'm usually just sucked into the game. In ED, I cannot avoid noticing these horrible shadows, like stinky, tall piles of dog crap in an otherwise beautiful garden (there is a compliment to Frontier hidden in this sentence).
As for performance, I often hit 60 FPS on my Slim, so Frontier has some GPU to spare to make shadows better. As I've said before, it's my own unprovable belief that Frontier just defaults the Slim to the Pro's performance mode (which purposefully sacrifices quality for 60 FPS), rather than giving us our own "in between" settings that would result in a good quality at 30 FPS on a Slim / Original.
Yeah it's a big damn mess. I'm taking videos right now. Asteroid rings look appalling