Shadows that should not fade! need help

[Legacy_NWN_baba yaga]

               So guys I´m really mad at the way shadows works. Now i fixed the house meshes to cast proper shadows but they fade away in a way that makes them completely useless.

Any advice help or suggestions in that regard is welcome. Maybe you Virusman or OTR can help me too if there is some secret i dont know yet how to fix that.

Here is a screenshot of 3 angles,



I mean for what do i fix shadows when they disappear like that?
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_NWN_baba yaga]

               Even an updated exe is appreciated i dont care. I´m sure there is just a little code or number that tells the engine "to fade" the shadow depending on the camera angle..so just a fixed exe with an updated angle like the camera hack i think of.

For what reason they did that anyway? In one of the very earliest screenshots of nwn back in 2001 the shadows are shadows and not some illusion!



And i tell you. I promise that i transfer 50 euro to you via paypal if you give me an updated thing that works! Drop me a line if you are serious about that cuz i am. So many years now hae enough stress test me on that issue!

They also had every creature skinmeshed and used different sun angles for the shadows...

And here bio must have changed it:

http://www.rage3d.co....php?t=33704566
               
               

               

                     Modifié par NWN_baba yaga, 24 juillet 2013 - 08:39 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_Social-Incursio]

               You're Tilesets looks really nice! '>
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_NWN_baba yaga]

               Thanks. I already did so much stuff for this tileset but as you can see in the screenshot the shadows are rendered useless. If I cannot fix it i have 2 options for alleys on which i already started working on!

1: dont mess with it at all... because alleys are much darker than streets...
2: separate them from the city terrain and create something more like an interior alley terrain (thats what I´m doing now)

Option 2 is not what i wanted but bright alleys arent either. So to create alleys that are much darker you have to create another area just because of them. That is not the way i do it for small connections btw. these stays within the city terrain too. But trashed, dark and dangerous alleys are not possible for me to simulate without separating them completely from the rest of the generic city scenes.

but here is a preview of what i already did,










               
               

               

                     Modifié par NWN_baba yaga, 25 juillet 2013 - 04:03 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_Pstemarie]

               Could you "fake it" by making a set of textures for the alleys that are darker than the rest of the buildings. Probably not what you're looking for but it might be easier than trying to fix this shadow-fade issue.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_OldMansBeard]

               Shadows fading at low camera angle is a "feature" of NWN and AFAIK, you can't prevent it.

If you want gloomy alleyways, you could try giving them unrendered shadowmesh roofs to catch the light falling from above and stop it reaching the walls and ground. Or change the ambient and diffuse on your meshes down from 1 1 1 - that makes them darker.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy__six]

               I have little constructive to add, but dayum gurl those are some nice tiles.

A different and darker floor texture for the tight passages would probably do a lot for it though IMO.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Shadooow]

               well i had this problem in my area and setting the area as exterior solved it and shadows stayed static then... which is strange since your area should be exterior..
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_NWN_baba yaga]

               Thanks so far for all your input but not really the answer i wished for... hehe.

@Pstemarie and _six
Using a different texture set is the best way i´m sure but it means another load of textures when i try to keep the details in balance. I already had to resize most textures to 256*256 because I need lots of them. I reuse whenever i can but to achieve what i want when the tileset reaches it´s finalization lots of different impressions in detail are needed.

You will see it when i´m ready;)
@OMB
The faking of shadows via correctly placed shadowmeshes is something i definately try out, that sounds promising.
I already tried the ambient/ diffuse kind of way changing the brightness of my textures but I recall me not happy with the result.

@  ShaDoOoW
Please post a screenshot what you mean that your shadows are rendered static. If it is a driver issue than hell i buy an older card:D
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Shadooow]

               

NWN_baba yaga wrote...

@  ShaDoOoW
Please post a screenshot what you mean that your shadows are rendered static. If it is a driver issue than hell i buy an older card:D

well make an interior area, in toolset enable shadows - shadows in toolset are always rendered static based on area-direction aka where north is

but ingame the shadows often moving and disappearing with your character, now i thought it was because exterior/interior but its not that i just made it work staticly (aka same as in toolset) in interior mode too

have you tried changing all area environment settings? it seems that when area is set to night the shadows are static and when as day shadows are gone/moving

my recent results werent 100% reliable... and maybe I even talking about something else than you need?
               
               

               

                     Modifié par ShaDoOoW, 26 juillet 2013 - 09:41 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_NWN_baba yaga]

               Hmm... shadows are still fading away when zooming out and changing the angle. So i thought getting rid of the property "fading light" in gidy_sun.mdl will help me... but no.

Interior areas are the same. When you reach a certain height and angle they disapear completely.

Is no one of you guys able to track down that stupid feature where it is hidden and if it is just a number that needs to be changed change that please!!! IT really destroys my whole vision....

The beam effect in tilesets do not fade away but it works just like the shadows. And why did bio added it in the first place never designed nwn for a free camera so why the use of this? You know when you are not able to see fading shadows because the camera was/is fixed where is the point?
               
               

               

                     Modifié par NWN_baba yaga, 26 juillet 2013 - 10:32 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_OldMansBeard]

               When NWN first came out, until patch 1.28, it was all high-angle views. You couldn't have camera angles below 45deg. So no-one would have seen the shadows fading and it didn't matter. Bioware only unocked the camera as a favour to players who wanted to turn NWN into a first-person game. But it isn't. Not really.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_NWN_baba yaga]

               I understand that bio did us a big favor with unlocking the camera and i didnt want to sound ungrateful but it really is an issue for me. It always was. And i just dont see the point for fading shadows in this unusuall way that adds simply nothing. A half eaten shadow is surely not better for the game performance as a full shadow thats stays where it belongs.

I already thought that it is maybe just a texture, somekind of a sprite attatched to the players origin and blends the shadow away. Like a flare texture with an alpha... alpha bugs we have many! So an invisble VFX that i dont know yet...
               
               

               

                     Modifié par NWN_baba yaga, 26 juillet 2013 - 11:00 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy__six]

               Having found something constructive to say...

The way NWN does shadows isn't something I've looked into much but based off the date of release and some of the bugs we get... The technique I suspect it uses only works correctly if the camera itself isn't inside the shadow. Since a low-angled camera has a much higher chance of being inside a building's shadow, the shadows are made to fade out in general according to the camera's pitch, so that the shadow bugs get hidden. A few years later, Doom 3 managed to fix that and other issues with shadow volumes, and since then games have pretty much universally adopted an entirely different solution to shadows using depth textures. For what happens when that goes wrong, look at the random black stripes you get in Skyrim on sub-maximum settings.

One other possible reason for the fade out is that rendering shadow volumes is a rather slow and kinda obscure process. At a lower camera angle you can see to larger distances - meaning more possible shadows. It's possible they faded them out to make rendering faster at low angles.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_s e n]

               is this a new baba-set? me wants see more, dont care of shadows, i always turn them off '>