Currently setting workspace.Terrain.CastShadow = false does not disable terrain shadows. My game has very flat terrain and I don’t think it needs shadows. Terrain can be made of many triangles so this could have a large effect on performance. Making it so terrain doesn’t cast shadows could be a good optimization for games that have flat terrain
7 Likes
What are the issues you’re having with shadows in the terrain system? You should focus your feature request on problems/use cases, not solutions as there are multiple ways of solving a problem. If your problem is shadows being not performant, you could write your feature request about how shadows aren’t performant.
Some people may not want shadows in their game this comment is very irrelevant
I understand that; but the way the feature request is written relies on one singular point (performance) and there is no evidence to back up the performance point. Also, in the How To Post a Feature Request topic it mentions that you should heavily focus on use cases and problems, not solutions. Another way to write this is “There is a lack of control over the shadow system”, which is a problem and doesn’t define an explicit solution. There are multiple ways to solve one problem, which is the main reason why you should write your feature requests like that; it allows room for discussion and discussing how to solve a problem together.
1 Like
From the OP, any sensible engineer can infer the following:
This developer wants the freedom to define whether or not shadows should be casted from terrain. They reason that terrain shadows are uncontributive to the aesthetic needs of their experience. They also raise the concern, that performing undesired lighting computations on this geometry, may be an otherwise avoidable waste of resources.
All considering, it seems redundant to ask OP to ‘back up his concerns with evidence’. Assessing how removing terrain shadows might impact performance, is not something developers can ever be expected to effectively measure, given their limited perspective, and lack of implementation details. It seems a reasonable enough concern—but it’s ultimately secondary to the obvious takeaway, that there exist developers that feel terrain shadows aren’t additive, and so would prefer if Terrain respected the CastShadow property, in the same fashion as other BaseParts.
5 Likes