Shadow edges softening

[Shumafuk]

What about softening the edges of shadows? Small visual tweak with great impact on realism (and HW ).

[CMAugust]

It's on the tracker, and substantial progress was made on it. Hopefully it can be picked up again before the next main release, as it looks very, very cool in game.

[AnyOldName3]

Soft shadows are either more realistic, or they're faster, but never both. The kinds that let you use lower-resolution shadow maps without being able to see pixel edges tend to blur things too much and have a tendency to have visual artefacts if you don't design the game world in a way that avoids them. The kinds that do a better job of modelling what light does need more shadow map lookups per pixel, so are slower.

[Atahualpa]

As an overview about the different techniques, I found this SIGGRAPH talk quite useful: Efficient real-time shadows (SIGGRAPH 2013 Courses).

[1:02:26] Filtered Hard Shadows
[1:18:50] Soft Shadows

It's not a great surprise that it all boils down to a trade-off between quality and performance. For a "realistic-enough" behaviour in all edge cases you have to do quite some coding magic and combine different techniques in order to avoid problems like light leaks or overshooting.

[Shumafuk]

Soft shadows are either more realistic, or they're faster, but never both. The kinds that let you use lower-resolution shadow maps without being able to see pixel edges tend to blur things too much and have a tendency to have visual artefacts if you don't design the game world in a way that avoids them. The kinds that do a better job of modelling what light does need more shadow map lookups per pixel, so are slower.

Of course it would be performance heavy feature, but it could be optional as many other features.

[CMAugust]

Seriously though, we have a mostly working soft shadows MR that, hopefully, is only temporarily closed. It's absolutely within reach, if the relevant know-how is developed to fill the remaining gaps.