Hey Lloyd, I hope you're reading this :)

I recently had the opportunity to test Elite Dangerous on the PS4 Pro. One of the major things that tempted me to purchase a Pro was the promise of better shadows in Elite Dangerous. And yes, shadows are pretty darn amazing in ED's quality mode on the PS4 Pro! However, for reasons I saved for another thread, I'm returning the Pro and sticking with my Slim. While I may be the exception in the forums, I believe overall I'm the 'rule', in that many more PS4 gamers in general own the 'vanilla' PS4 instead of the Pro. So about those 'vanilla' shadows...

I do not expect the very sharp, dynamic, and long-range shadows that PS4 Pro gets in quality mode. I realize that has to be GPU intensive. I'm okay with soft or even a bit blurry shadows, to a point. My biggest complaint with ED's shadows is the extreme flickering, which creates these "Yars revenge" patterns on the mailslot and flashing, strobe-like patches everywhere else. I already submitted this as a bug back when 2.4 dropped, and it sounded like it was being treated as such, yet here we are many months later and it's still really bad.

Speaking of the PS4 Pro, these exact shadows are seen in performance mode, so :p to everyone who said my Slim was dying.

There has got to be a way to give us something in between the laser-sharp shadows of the Pro's quality mode and what we currently have on PS4 Vanilla. Just get rid of that flickering, please. I noticed in some PSVR games that LOD is emphasized toward the center-of-view and softened more toward the edges. Would it be possible for you guys to have quality "zones" in ED? For example, the mailslot is always a focal-point in the game when we are docking, so perhaps you could code mailslot shadows to be a higher quality while keeping the lower quality, higher performance shadows for the periphery items.

So long story short, both the PS4 Slim and the XBox One are the two 'popular' consoles, so please Frontier, keep developing ED with these in mind. The more you optimize for the base consoles, the easier it will be to someday offer 4K and other enhancements to those who own the Pro and XB1X.

Thank you! [heart] [heart] [heart]

ps - I know you can make this happen, I have renewed faith :)


I play on Xbox one X and those bloody strobing shadows are doing my nut. Every station I approach looks like a rave is kicking into high gear. I've also noticed that the distance with which assets load in has been severely reduced, so its basically popping right in front of your face. Others dont seem to be noticing this, but I've been playing for a long time now and I notice it. Put it in a bug report and it got forsaken. Its really bad in rings. The high res texture popping is obscene.
All other games work fine so I know its not my console at fault. I hope this gets addressed and fixed on both platforms.
 
I play on Xbox one X and those bloody strobing shadows are doing my nut. Every station I approach looks like a rave is kicking into high gear. I've also noticed that the distance with which assets load in has been severely reduced, so its basically popping right in front of your face. Others dont seem to be noticing this, but I've been playing for a long time now and I notice it. Put it in a bug report and it got forsaken. Its really bad in rings. The high res texture popping is obscene.
All other games work fine so I know its not my console at fault. I hope this gets addressed and fixed on both platforms.

And here I was starting to get XBox envy! I am amazed that more people aren't up in arms about this. I think the majority of players in this forum are using the Pro in Quality Mode, which gives them very sharp shadows (though I seem to remember the moire pattern even on the Pro..), and the many in this forum also play ED on the same TV they grew up watching All In The Family In, but now through cataracts as well ;)

This is the one bug I care enough about to resubmit AGAIN, so please add your own observations here:

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...ors-STILL-look-HORRIBLE-when-over-on-a-planet!

If enough people chime in, then maybe Frontier will take this seriously and actually fix it before the children playing this game get cataracts from old age, too...
 

stormyuk

Volunteer Moderator
Yeh, I think Wilfred mentioned some shadow issue in certain circumstances on the Pro, I am usually really happy with the shadows on the Pro and not had much issue.
 
Yeh, I think Wilfred mentioned some shadow issue in certain circumstances on the Pro, I am usually really happy with the shadows on the Pro and not had much issue.

I believe different shaders are used for shadows that are cast from one object onto another object (like the shadow of the mailslot against the station bulkhead) than those used to shade a surface based on its angle to a light source. The former looks great on PS4 Pro in quality mode, but I think you might be able to see the bug I reported which is the latter. To test this for yourself, take a ship like the Dolphin or even an Anaconda down to a planet in bright sunlight and look at the "dashboard" as you roll and yaw.

I'd like to see both types of shadows improved on PS4 Original / Slim, but right now I'm focusing on the surface shaders in our cockpit because 1) I know without a doubt this is a bug that was introduced in 3.0.? and thus it should be easily fixable, and 2) it's "in my face" whenever I visit a planet, which I do quite often because I love exploring planets.

I just hope Lloyd and FDev take this bug as seriously as they are currently taking the SRV bug
 
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stormyuk

Volunteer Moderator
I just hope Lloyd and FDev take this bug as seriously as they are currently taking the SRV bug

Yeh I guess we just have different views on whats most serious, the SRV bug to me is game breaking, hard crash, that's always got to be higher priority than graphics tweaks, I have reported enough graphical issues in the past and I do agree they should all be sorted.

Most of the graphics issues I have reported have never been fixed. :(
 
Yeh I guess we just have different views on whats most serious, the SRV bug to me is game breaking, hard crash, that's always got to be higher priority than graphics tweaks, I have reported enough graphical issues in the past and I do agree they should all be sorted.

Most of the graphics issues I have reported have never been fixed. :(

I agree with you that SRV fix is top priority, even though it affects me personally less than the graphics bugs. Anything that crashes a PS4 to blue screen (never seen this in any other game) is BAD. The minute they fix this bug, however, my bug better be next on their list [sulk]
 
Meanwhile, the shadows in No Man's Sky are amazing! I guess my humble PS4 Slim isn't overheating after all :p

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Its not just the shadows they still have the crackle when taking an Imperial cutter through the mail slot, now how long has that been,
 
I wonder if the new lighting system in Q4 will affect the shadows? For better or for worse.

Thoughts?

I was once hopeful about this, because the original plan was for Frontier to provide multiple light sources - two stars give us two shadows, for example. They've since tabled that plan and are instead just giving us some post-processing "the sun is bright!" effects. The former would have required a reworking of the shader code (which is where the problem lies), whereas the latter doesn't.

Frontier is horrible at fixing bugs - this is just a reality I've had to learn to accept. They haven't fixed the months-old SRV crashing bug, which has a ton of players upset and results in a BSOD, so I've long given up the idea that they will fix my terrible shadows, which far fewer players complain about.

I'm not even excited about Q4 anymore, because with the shiny ice and the planet probe will come even more god-awful bugs that will never get fixed... :(
 
Meanwhile, the shadows in No Man's Sky are amazing! I guess my humble PS4 Slim isn't overheating after all :p

And only 15 people work on that game out of a somewhat crappy office. Too add they get updates out within a month to fix bugs. They already announced they have a patch coming to fix the bugs that came with the recent update and it hasn't even been a week since it came out. Frointer has 100+ working for them and it takes months to "fix" bugs.
 
I don't think it's just an ED thing. I suspect it's a PS4 thing.

I've got an XBox One X with Quality and 4K modes activated and I've seen similar issues. Lots of flickering shadows and some ugly gradients on the hull of my Beluga. I'm not a stickler for these sorts of things, but I thought the XBox One X was going to chew up and spit out anything a game could throw at it.
 
I've got an XBox One X with Quality and 4K modes activated and I've seen similar issues. Lots of flickering shadows and some ugly gradients on the hull of my Beluga. I'm not a stickler for these sorts of things, but I thought the XBox One X was going to chew up and spit out anything a game could throw at it.

Another reason I decided not to buy new hardware in order to try to make ED look better... It's kinda sad considering how the original Elite was able to do so much with the very limited hardware of the time (like my Commodore 64).
 
I was once hopeful about this, because the original plan was for Frontier to provide multiple light sources - two stars give us two shadows, for example. They've since tabled that plan and are instead just giving us some post-processing "the sun is bright!" effects. The former would have required a reworking of the shader code (which is where the problem lies), whereas the latter doesn't.

Frontier is horrible at fixing bugs - this is just a reality I've had to learn to accept. They haven't fixed the months-old SRV crashing bug, which has a ton of players upset and results in a BSOD, so I've long given up the idea that they will fix my terrible shadows, which far fewer players complain about.

I'm not even excited about Q4 anymore, because with the shiny ice and the planet probe will come even more god-awful bugs that will never get fixed... :(

Well that’s a shame now isn’t it. I wish they’d just do things properly the first time, even JWE is bugged.
 
Quite frankly I think if the shadows are not fixed by the time the Q4 huge update hits, then it'll never happen. but that's only my opinion.
I am wondering if the PS4 is now the red haired step child of Frontier while the XB1X gets all the attention?
 

stormyuk

Volunteer Moderator
I was playing... *cough* but Yeh please do keep topics on topic or I'll have to tell on you. We can always compare this and that game but I do hope FDev are beavering away with the PS4 version.
 
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