[scottb613]

Hi Folks,

Question: While totally subjective - just like to hear some opinions before I make the effort to test... Just how much of an impact on performance would you expect to see when enabling shadows on every shape of a route ? Would this render your "typical" route unusable or is this routinely done ??? Could I just go through and enable the shadows on everything in the shape directory - or - might the be some objects I really want to avoid ?

Regards,
Scott

[James Ross]

My advice for route building would be to mark every object which should have a large, visible shadow as a 'shadow caster' - things like buildings and bridges and other large structures near the right-of-way. Things you can see from a reasonable distance. Typical, large trees should be included, but small bushes and grass and such things can probably be excluded. See-through fences (e.g. chain link) can be excluded.

Enabling 'shadow all shapes' will typically be a big performance hit, since you are effectively drawing everything twice. How much more of a hit than shadows (but not all shapes) will depend on how much the route builder marked things as 'shadow caster'.

I'd say that, if you have a decent CPU and GPU, most routes will run with 'shadow all shapes' enabled with acceptable performance. There are always exceptions, particularly some recent routes, which have a lot of scenery and will suffer from it. Some will suffer even without 'shadow all shapes' because there are so many 'shadow casters'. I normally run with dynamic shadows but not 'shadow all shapes'.

[scottb613]

Hi James,

Thanks for the very informative response - sir...
:)

Regards,
Scott

[markus_GE]

Having fiddled around with the shadows quite a lot, as on many of my routes the creators seem ti simply have forgotten to enable shadows, I can say, it IS a performance bog, if you just enable ShadowAllShapes (need to change a registry entry to do that). If you, however, also fiddle around a little with the other shadow-related registry entries, you might well get acceptable performance on something like the MONON again.

Here´s my stats and specs:

Intel Core i5 dual core (virtual quad core, however that works) @ 2.27 gHz non-overclocked (my cooler isn´t strong enough)
AMD ATI Radeon HD 5650 GC with 1024 MB (1GB) VRAM

In registry under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\OpenRails\ORTS\...
ShadowAllShapes = 1
ShadowMapBlur = 0
ShadowMapCount = 2
ShadowMapResolution i not existent, so I suppose I just set it to the default value

These stats and specs give me about 25 FPS on the Monon, which is fairly acceptable opposed to MSTS' 15 FPS max, IMHO.

Of course, graphics card settings will also come into play, if you set them to override software settings... but that´s a long story.

Cheers, Markus

[disc]

I'm using shadowallshapes enabled all time, as on most of the routes a lot of shapes have disabled shadows. This isn't makes big impact on FPS, but the overhead wires and such thin shape shadows doesn't look good (looks like a dotted line, or splotches), but still better to have these shadow artifacts than not having the most of the shadows...
I'd say even on bushes the shadows should be enabled, the only exceptions should be such shapes that aren't looking good with shadows, like the overhead wires.
However the thin shape shadows would look good on higher shadow map resolution.

(and i don't have a nasa pc, just a quad core Athlon II CPU at 3,1, 4 GB of DDR2 ram, and a radeon HD5770 with 1 GB ram)

[RTP]

I have the shadows enabled most of the time.

But: some objects, like moving cars in the roads has no shadows.
And the shadow of the train is very light, must be darker.

My PC is an HP workstation, INTEL XEON four cores eight threads ( in fact is an eight cores with four disabled ), 3.3GHz, 4Gb DDR3 and an NVIDIA Quadro 600.

Perhaps I need a bit more graphics, say an NVIDIA Quadro 4000, but is a bit expensive.

I am satisfied, anyway.

Cheers.

RTP

[markus_GE]

 disc, on 02 May 2014 - 02:52 PM, said:

I'm using shadowallshapes enabled all time, as on most of the routes a lot of shapes have disabled shadows. This isn't makes big impact on FPS, but the overhead wires and such thin shape shadows doesn't look good (looks like a dotted line, or splotches), but still better to have these shadow artifacts than not having the most of the shadows...
I'd say even on bushes the shadows should be enabled, the only exceptions should be such shapes that aren't looking good with shadows, like the overhead wires.
However the thin shape shadows would look good on higher shadow map resolution.

(and i don't have a nasa pc, just a quad core Athlon II CPU at 3,1, 4 GB of DDR2 ram, and a radeon HD5770 with 1 GB ram)

Higher shadow map resolutions will cure all the problems that arise with not using ShadowMapBlur (like jagged edges on all shadows, and only splotches of shadow drawn for small objects). Increasing the ShadowMapResolution, however, definitely comes at a price: From experience, the performance losses for doubled ShadowMapResolution (when ShadowAllShapes is enabled in both parts of the comparison) average at about twice the severity of the losses when using ShadowAllShapes VS no ShadowAllShapes (Hope that sentence can still be understood...).

Cheers, Markus

[scottb613]

Hi Folks,

Ahh - didn't t know there were registry entries to do this - that makes testing easy - I had planned on scripting changes to each shape file... I'll give this a try - thanks !

Regards,
Scott

[markus_GE]

Yep, it´s registry entries. But don´t worry if you don´t find them: This means, they are set to their default values. You will have to create them then.

That´s the list of shadow-related registry entries possible with ORTS (all should be DWORD type)

ShadowAllShapes - all shapes shadowed (1) or only those shadowed, that are set to have a shadow (0); default is OFF (0)
ShadowMapBlur - should the shadow edges be blurred (1) or not (0); default is ON (1)
ShadowMapCount - how many shadow maps are rendered, default is 2, AFAIK
ShadowMapResolution - the amount of pixels for both dimensions of the shadow map(s), default is 1024, AFAIK


Hope that helps,

Cheers, Markus

PS: Don´t forget to close the registry editor before you try your settings, as otherwise there´s a chance your changes will not be saved properly. Also, if you set an entry´s value to it´s default and run ORTS, the entry will be deleted.