[Sid P.]

Hi All,
My problem with "strange shadowing" has vanished - I upgraded my video card. My old card was a Sapphire ATI X1950 Pro, it has worked well for years. I have just installed a new Sapphire AMD HD 7770 - everything looks great! I am running experimental release X1593.

Sid P.

[Genma Saotome]

Sid, there was a bug fix submitted at (or just before) version 1600 that was for weird shadows. Fixed things for me.

[Sid P.]

Dave - Thanks for the info. I tried immediate comparisons with X1587 before and after the swap, and I am pretty sure that my shadowing was somehow related to the old card. Although its published specs met all of the requirements of OR.
Also, I may not have noticed other types of shadowing.
Sid P.

[disc]

Genma Saotome, on 10 May 2013 - 01:00 PM, said:

Sid, there was a bug fix submitted at (or just before) version 1600 that was for weird shadows. Fixed things for me.

That fix made those problems less frequent(maybe? maybe i just imagine that), but still there and very visible at sunset/sunrise. Some shadows are fading, some shadows are disappear as i turn the camera. As i see shadowing have more and more problems as the game evolve. The first released shadowing was nearly perfect, and i don't remember any problems with that.

The best place to view these bugs is "Morning in Maryland" activity on default NEC. Eternal view and rotate the camera.

[markus_GE]

I can just agree to disc, shadowing seems to become "worse" with time advancing (it´s still better than in MSTS however). When I "joined" OR at about x.1427 also the forest objects had shadows. Now, with x.1593 (have not yet had the time to get the new one, will do that next) they have somehow been "swallowed" by the game. ShadowAllShapes turned on.

[disc]

That's funny, all of the train sims have problems with shadowing. TS2013 have good looking shadows, but those are rendered to max 100m distance from camera, and have big performance impact.
Trainz don't have good shadows at all.
MSTS haven't got real shadows.
And OR have these fading, disappearing shadows problem...

The best shadowing/performance i've seen was in Mafia II. That 3d engine is amazing, how amazing everything is looks like in it, while it have really low system requirements (i can run it on max graphics on a 6 years old ATI radeon HD3850, only the clothing physx effects are off, and still runs better and looks better than any other games).

[James Ross]

disc, on 11 May 2013 - 09:51 AM, said:

That fix made those problems less frequent(maybe? maybe i just imagine that), but still there and very visible at sunset/sunrise. Some shadows are fading, some shadows are disappear as i turn the camera. As i see shadowing have more and more problems as the game evolve. The first released shadowing was nearly perfect, and i don't remember any problems with that.

This is mostly an optimisation problem; to get the shadows 'right' we must render everything that could be blocking the sun at a particular place but the more we render, the worse the performance. The problems with the rotating camera making bits of the shadows disappear, especially at dawn/dusk, is entirely down to this issue - figuring out what is in view of a bit of ground is not always easy and, especially at dusk/dawn, takes in a huge strip across the landscape to work (and any 1 item missing could leave a gap). Couple this with people who don't program this kind of graphics in their professional lives and it is very easy to have issues crop up. We will get it right in the end and would prefer people keep a positive attitude towards issues. :)

Thanks.

[Sid P.]

disc, on 11 May 2013 - 09:51 AM, said:

That fix made those problems less frequent(maybe? maybe i just imagine that), but still there and very visible at sunset/sunrise. Some shadows are fading, some shadows are disappear as i turn the camera. As i see shadowing have more and more problems as the game evolve. The first released shadowing was nearly perfect, and i don't remember any problems with that.

The best place to view these bugs is "Morning in Maryland" activity on default NEC. Eternal view and rotate the camera.

Hi Disc - I had been using the Surfliner 1 "Amtrak to Los Angeles" activity to test my shadowing, and it has cleared up there except just around sunrise and sunset, so I thought that it was fixed by my video card upgrade. But NEC "Morning In Maryland", which I had never tested, still shows the same effects as you show in your video. (Even with my new card!)
Some of the shadows seem to change when I move the viewpoint with the mouse, others when I move the viewpoint with the NUM keys. But they are reproducible.

I can certainly live with them as OR is developing.

Sid P.