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how to change Shadow map properties?
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Gian-Reto Offline
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Post: #1
how to change Shadow map properties?
After some fooling around I finally got my Terrain working and could set up a very basic prototype to check it out ingame. I'm impressed with the visual quality, and after some tweaking of my view distance settings, also with the Framerate....

But:
I noticed that shadows are not that good. Not that this is a problem unique to Esenthel, all the Engines I've seen are having this problem, and also some AAA Games I've played seem to still have some problems with it.

I'm talking of course of "flickering" and "jagged edges", which are, to my knowledge, Shadow map resolution problems.

I had a cheap but effective tweak in Unity, that worked very well for my specific case (45-75 degree "isometric" view). I turned off cascading and manually set the shadow map distance based on the zoom factor (well, the distance at which shadows are not visible anymore, the resolution is fixed to one of three values in Unity).

It didn't made the problem go away completly, but after I found the correct shadow distance for the different zoom levels, and how to increase it when zooming out, the result was much better.

So I'd like to know:
- Is it possible to turn off cascading in the Esenthel engine? I really don't like it, and would rather turn down the shadow distance.
- Can I set the shadow distance in my game? This way, I could create my own "Shadow-LOD"-Function
03-23-2011 10:34 AM
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Esenthel Online
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Post: #2
RE: how to change Shadow map properties?
You can specify shadow splits distances, D.shd_something, dont remember, it's usage is presented in ERPG2 demo.

There is of course D.shdReduceFlicker which helps (read its comments)
and all other D.shd* methods
03-23-2011 10:48 AM
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Gian-Reto Offline
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Post: #3
RE: how to change Shadow map properties?
while D.shdReduceFlicker didn't help much, combining jittering and soft shadows with a larger resolution did the trick for me, loosing only about 1-2 FPS and making the Shadow flickering much less noticable.

Cool, thanks Esenthel.
03-24-2011 01:52 PM
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