Will there be a studio option to increase the resolution of shadows?
I’ve noticed that the shadows are heavily pixelated if you turn shadow softness all the way down, and I think allowing players to increase the resolution, or simply just increase the resolution of the shadows would fix this.
Sharper shadows arguably look better and more realistic than blurred shadows.
Yeah, and to add to this, shadow resolution should scale with the quality level. For example, quality levels 3, 4, and maybe 5 should have low res shadows, while 6, 7 and 8 have the shadow resolution we have now. And finally, 9 & 10 should have the highest quality shadows.
I think tying HD shadows to 9 & 10 wouldn’t be a good idea, considering you’d also have performance hits from anti aliasing being forced on, regardless of GPU settings for some unholy reason.
I think having the shadow resolution be separate within Studio settings (like graphics API or FrameRateManager), or have an advanced graphics option alongside Manual & Automatic would be good for this.
I dislike having the current Quality system because it prevents players, myself included, from having the highest render distance, which wouldn’t be that much of a problem on it’s own, simply because ambient shadows and anti aliasing is forced on, regardless of Radeon or Nvidia settings.
Does turning off CastShadows on a part help performance? I have many parts in my game that don’t need to cast shadows and I’m curious. Maybe that’s micro-optimizing?
I had my friend try it with a 960 2GB GPU still the shadows were jittering or “Teleporting”, tried it on an empty place as well with just one part you could see the same effect happen for some reason, anyways I’m gonna wait longer cause this is still new
Here’s an example of the issue I am having, as you can see the shadow is jittery and since the time on the other game moves way slower the shadow takes a while to move
No, this is a problem with the shadows for sure. I’ve experienced this same issue with my own day cycle system which increases ClockTime by a tiny, tiny, tiny amount every RunService.Stepped and the shadows still update very coarsely.
Tl;dr I update the sun’s position in what is basically the smoothest possible way and shadows still update coarsely.
I think they have it set like that so the cast shadows have potential to be run smoothly on large places. Should be optional depending on place size IMO
They have the shadow distance really small regardless of quality level currently however so I don’t think slowing the shadow update rate is going to make a difference.
According to @zeuxcg they planned on increasing the distance in which it rendered the high quality shadows, so I think it was intentional to do that. If not then it’s a bug they have to fix
I think other people have reported this as well, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt to show how it happened to me. I’m encountering that weird corner shadow glitch that makes it pop up weirdly.
(Look at the corner that connects the floor and the sides of the boat.)
I have just found some “flickering” issue on the player character when shaded by a close object:
In this example i added to the player character a cylinder as another limb with motor6D and noticed the shade caste by it is looking as shown. It didn’t appear with any of the other technologies.
Despite that, I think you are doing amazing work improving ROBLOX, the new technology is really adding a whole new level of accuracy and polish to the shadows.
I’m not sure there really is an elegant solution to this problem, so here goes;
In my game there is a section you can unlock called the “Underworld”. When creating this area I wanted it to be closed off from the main island of the game, but I also didn’t want people to be able to see the underworld from the main island.
Picture of the map from the side
The underworld uses an inversed mesh so players can’t see out
I am forced to do this because there isn’t any good ways of hiding portions of the map when players aren’t in the area; a ZoneService of sorts would be useful, but that’s for a whole other thread
Anyway, with the current setup of the game this becomes increasingly problematic with ShadowMap technology - there is a super annoying shadow that is cast on the “roof” of the mesh “skybox” when in the underworld, as seen here:
Shadow
(Note: The shadow usually takes up a little more space on the mesh, I had to move the camera down a bit so the picture made sense)
This was already (admittedly less of) a problem with Voxel technology - it’s not game breaking and I could probably live with it, I just wish there was an easy solution to stop the shadows casting onto certain areas or parts. Perhaps some kind of property on meshes to “show shadows”, or something.
I also tried turning off the “CastShadow” property for the bottom of the map, but then it becomes even weirder because shadows of objects on the surface (e.g. rocks, trees, buildings) are still shown on the roof of the Underworld, but not the map’s floor itself… Maybe parts with CastShadow enabled could not send shadows through parts with CastShadow set to false?
I understand if there isn’t a solution/won’t be a future solution to this problem - I know it’s an edge case and probably won’t affect a ton of games - just wondering if there was something I could use to stop shadows in certain places that I’m missing!
You might be able to fix this by loading the underworld locally per player when they go to it, you would have to add a loading screen but it should solve your problem I believe.
Sure, I could, but I’d have to remake the scripts in the droppers if I were running them locally. If you just mean setting things to be invisible, it wouldn’t make much sense performance wise to have the entire main island become invisible when in the underworld, and vise versa. It would also get a bit complicated with parts that already change transparency.