Terrain shadows: what a pity

[Guest]

Hm, a disappointment in the shadow deparment. It's odd that when you test something you often do not look at things you look at when you actually fly.

 

I did some tests yesterday and ended up with settings that enabled me to fly with buildings, vegetation and terrain shadows on. Today I wanted to do my first ever complete (short) flight in P3D. It didn't take long before I noticed that with the shadows set to anything below the max, you can SEE them being build up in the not too far disctance...! This is most apparent with the terrain shadows and mountains. I was flying over Norway and I could see a very hard line where the shadows ended, moving all the time (whenever I moved my head with TrackIR). All mountains beyond that had no shadows at all! It look odd and awful!

 

Now the big problem is that the highest settings destroys performance but disabling the terrain shadows removes ALL the shadows... so everything looks somehow sunny and flat! FSX had the shadows baked in but at least you could see shadows! Flying without shadows at all is a no go, specially when you fly low and slow like me.

 

Now I really hope that the GPU I plan to purchase sometime soon will solve this problem: hopefully it enables me to fly with shadows at high. Maybe someone who has a GTX780 can tell me if he can use the highest shadow quality setting AND at least terrain shadows? If this doesn't work as I hope, it will be a step backwards from FSX. Quit a large step too.

 

Problem is that now I've seen this, I can't enjoy a flight in the mountains anymore LOL I think I will have to fly in the Netherlands until I have my new GTX780 (or whatever). What a pity, I was happy yesterday.

 

It's funny though... the first day everything is wrong with the sim. The second day you find some solutions and everything is great. And the third day, when you actually go flying, some more problem come up... Let's see if tomorrow everything is fine again.

[bonchie 2,305]

 

I think they should put the old terrain shadowing system back in.

 

Being baked in was fine. Maybe they will if people go over there and request it. 

[WarpD 824]

Wow... so FSX is released and everyone complains about how it can't take advantage of the latest hardware at all... L-M releases a new Prepar3D that makes the latest hardware sweat and people complain.

 

That's kinda sad really.

[SolRayz 392]

^

no no no...that is false...P3D is not cutting edge that should be making our hardware sweat...I'm sorry but that's ridiculous.

 

Please no more bad news, Jaroen! I was close to pulling the trigger. Plus, you have GTX580 which is more than adequate to play all modern games and fsx at max settings more or less. I really hope LM has some solutions down the pipeline, or maybe some collaberation with Nvidia for the next few driver updates.  

[Guest]

 

 

That's kinda sad really.

 

I don't see what's sad about that? Do I HAVE to love everything P3D/LM does...? That's nonsense. I praise what I like but I will also moan about what I don't like.

 

Anyway, now I've seen this I have to agree that it would be nice to have to option to choose baked in shadows. In all honesty... I never knew or noticed they were (temporarily) baked into the textures in FSX... so it was fine with me! (Although I have to say that the shadows at high looks great... only fps drops terribly).

 

 

 

Please no more bad news, Jaroen! I was close to pulling the trigger. Plus, you have GTX580 which is more than adequate to play all modern games and fsx at max settings more or less. I really hope LM has some solutions down the pipeline, or maybe some collaberation with Nvidia for the next few driver updates.

 

LOL Well, I knew my GTX580 wouldn't be able to have all options full right so that's not the problem. I am mainly curious if a top end card can pull it off because I can't see myself enjoying all this without terrain shadows. And yes, that card is good enough for most games but this isn't a game, right...!?

[WarpD 824]

^

no no no...that is false...P3D is not cutting edge that should be making our hardware sweat...I'm sorry but that's ridiculous.

 

Please no more bad news, Jaroen! I was close to pulling the trigger. Plus, you have GTX580 which is more than adequate to play all modern games and fsx at max settings more or less. I really hope LM has some solutions down the pipeline, or maybe some collaberation with Nvidia for the next few driver updates.  

It's ridiculous how?  It's happening, I know you don't want to admit it, but it is.

[Alan_A 1,650]

As I just posted in another thread, it's all about tuning right now.  In tests (no cross-country yet), I love the look of the terrain and building shadows, but I'm not yet sure I can handle them against maximum cloud coverage density.  So nice as the shadows are, I may wind up turning them off, because holes in the overcast just don't do it for me.  Working with FSX was a similar process - I loved the "sheen" of water at max but it was more than my system could handle given other settings that I liked.  FSX was never about having all sliders right, it was about choosing among the sliders.  P3D v2 should be similar.  

 

Overall, I have to say P3D is staggeringly smooth compared to FSX (Manhattan is now flyable for me in real-world conditions for the first time in, I don't know, a decade or more).  So I'm happy to tune and make tradeoffs to get the overall benefit.

[SolRayz 392]

 

 

LOL Well, I knew my GTX580 wouldn't be able to have all options full right so that's not the problem. I am mainly curious if a top end card can pull it off because I can't see myself enjoying all this without terrain shadows. And yes, that card is good enough for most games but this isn't a game, right...!?

 

Here is an idea, if you own FTX Global, wouldn't that solve the problem. That should have baked shadows, so you can disable in game shadows, right?

 

I'm not sure I follow the whole "baked shadows" thing. I guess I never thought about that in FSX.

[molleh 451]

Jeroen, I made a thread about this very same issue yesterday, with screenshots to demonstrate:

Bummer about terrain shadows.

 

Also it is worse than you think - the standard terrain shading is reversed so that the terrain is dark on the sunlit side and vice versa.

 

 

Here is an idea, if you own FTX Global, wouldn't that solve the problem. That should have baked shadows, so you can disable in game shadows, right?
 
I'm not sure I follow the whole "baked shadows" thing. I guess I never thought about that in FSX.

 

No, Global or any other texture is irrelevant - we are talking about the terrain shadows, for example a tall mountain casting its long shadow during sunrise or sunset over the terrain around it. In FSX they were semi-realtime. When you changed time of day in the sim it re-calculated those shadows and then updated the shadows. In P3D they did away with those shadows (which actually looked really good and with negligible performance impact) and tried to replace them with the shadow system they added with the new DX11 renderer - which is way too costly in performance and looks awful, plus even on Ultra shadow settings it's way too limited in draw distance.

[Guest]

I sort of solved the problem for now by simply disabling Terrain Cast but letting the buildings and vegetation cast shadow on the terrain. This is a lot better for fps and it looks nice. In fact, the shadows that are casted by the trees almost make up for the terrain not casting shadows itself! I will post some screenshots later on.

 

@molleh: yes, exactly! Although I had the idea that on Ultra I couldn't see the edge. But well, it isn't perfect. And you've got a GTX680 with 2 GB already. I am beginning to wonder if a GTX780 can pull this off!

 

EDIT

 

Two comparison screenshots. Things look SO MUCH better with building and vegetation shadows!

 

Without building and vegetation shadows:

 

 

With building and vegetation shadows (terrain only set to receive):

 

[molleh 451]

Going from a 580 to a 780Ti for you would probably give you some framerate back, but I'm skeptical it would be worth the upgrade cost. My system spec is still pretty close to top-end (for running on a single 1080p display anyway) and the shadows really crush the framerate. If they can just re-enable FSX's terrain shadowing (and fix the reversed lighting bug) then all would be fine.

 

I'm actually going back to FSX for now until they sort some of this stuff out. Thankfully we have the knowledge now that the sim is being actively fixed and improved, unlike what we had to deal with for the last 7 years..

 

For me, once you get used to the beautiful subtle lighting when flying in hilly/mountainous terrain in FSX in twilight conditions it's hard to live without it.

[SolRayz 392]

Jeroen, I made a thread about this very same issue yesterday, with screenshots to demonstrate:

Bummer about terrain shadows.

 

Also it is worse than you think - the standard terrain shading is reversed so that the terrain is dark on the sunlit side and vice versa.

 

 

 

No, Global or any other texture is irrelevant - we are talking about the terrain shadows, for example a tall mountain casting its long shadow during sunrise or sunset over the terrain around it. In FSX they were semi-realtime. When you changed time of day in the sim it re-calculated those shadows and then updated the shadows. In P3D they did away with those shadows (which actually looked really good and with negligible performance impact) and tried to replace them with the shadow system they added with the new DX11 renderer - which is way too costly in performance and looks awful, plus even on Ultra shadow settings it's way too limited in draw distance.

 

 

Oh I see thanks for the clarification.

[Kyle Schurb 89]

Well, I don't know if this helps or not, but these screenshots were created using a 'Titan' - albeit, expensive, further goes to show how P3D seems to have shifted the load from CPU to GPU. These shots appear to have terrain shadow casting on. The author raves about the performance, even so compared to P3D 1.4 -- 

While there doesn't appear to be any of the shadow "reversing" compared to where the sunlight comes from, I must say it appears somewhat blocky on the backside of some of the terrain, particularly in the takeoff roll shots.

Bandwidth Warning, ~80 high resolution shots:
 

http://airdailyx.blogspot.com/2013/11/prepar3d-v2-first-trip-report-lflj-to.html
 

[Sesquashtoo 2,846]

Jeroen, I made a thread about this very same issue yesterday, with screenshots to demonstrate:

Bummer about terrain shadows.

 

Also it is worse than you think - the standard terrain shading is reversed so that the terrain is dark on the sunlit side and vice versa.

 

 

 

No, Global or any other texture is irrelevant - we are talking about the terrain shadows, for example a tall mountain casting its long shadow during sunrise or sunset over the terrain around it. In FSX they were semi-realtime. When you changed time of day in the sim it re-calculated those shadows and then updated the shadows. In P3D they did away with those shadows (which actually looked really good and with negligible performance impact) and tried to replace them with the shadow system they added with the new DX11 renderer - which is way too costly in performance and looks awful, plus even on Ultra shadow settings it's way too limited in draw distance.

Wouldn't the FSX program: SHADE correct this and you could turn the terrain shadows off?  Of course, SHADE would have to work in P3D.....

[HughesMDflyer4 470]

Wouldn't the FSX program: SHADE correct this and you could turn the terrain shadows off?  Of course, SHADE would have to work in P3D.....

Shade adjusts the darkness of shadows. It doesn't create shadows.