Spiky, moving shadows on vertical surfaces.

[BaronPampa]

I've checked out raevol's settings - they make the issue go away in my case too.

[AnyOldName3]

Can you isolate which thing makes the biggest difference (and if there's maybe a value closer to the default that also works)?

[raevol]

Turning off player shadows is really weird. It's so weird, in fact, that Scrawl didn't see any point in there being an option for it. There's no conceivable way it could be causing the issues in this thread.

Woops I missed that.

For split point uniform logarithmic ratio the jury's out on which value is genuinely the best middle ground for all situations, but lots of people prefer to have it at 1.0 or just below 1.0, especially with an increased view distance.

I'll give that a shot.

8.0 strikes me as a very large value for normal offset distance. If it's the one thing making the artefacts go away, that's fine, and maybe the documentation for the recommended range should be changed, but if everything works how I expect, it would make everything seem to float 11cm off the ground, which would be noticeable.

This was what I guessed fixed it. I'll try some more exhaustive testing when I get home.

[raevol]

Ok... doing some fun stuff with this.

Increasing the shadow map resolution definitely helps with the original issue. Increasing the number of shadow maps helps too. My sweet spot seems to be 4 shadow maps and 4096 shadow map resolution.

Some fun things:

4 shadow maps: looks fine
5 shadow maps: looks fine but not better than 4
6 shadow maps: same as 5
7 shadow maps: textures are weirdly bright or dark
8 shadow maps: textures are gone, game looks like everything is metal
9 shadow maps or more: game crashes before it gets to the menu

8096 shadow map resolution runs fine for me briefly, and then my FPS suddenly drops to 3. The draw as well as the physics times skyrocket. I assume this has to do with my GPU memory?

But so what I am learning here is that there are sane value boundaries for these. We should figure out what these are, what they depend on (universal due to algorithm? depends on system resources?) and document that, or build the limits into gui elements...

[akortunov]

I can confirm that 4-th shadowmap definely makes situaltion better, but it replaces a used texture slot, so I get some white textures.
As for shadowmap resolution, 1024 is enough for actor shadows and 2048 is enough for shadows for everything for me (without Distant Terrain and "compute tight scene bounds"). 4096 is too high for my GTX1050 (FPS starts to decrease with high values in the GPU section).
The "compute tight scene bounds" has a quite a large preformance impact for me (~10-20 FPS for me during evening and morning, high values in the Cull section).

[raevol]

so I get some white textures.

Are you seeing at 4 what I am seeing at 7? What does 5 look like for you? How strange!

[akortunov]

What does 5 look like for you?

As a 4, but with lower FPS.

[raevol]

Interesting... ok so this is system dependent.

[akortunov]

Interesting... ok so this is system dependent.

Or more likely a resource-dependent - I got a white texture on the Spellbreaker mesh from the Forgotten Shields: Artifacts mod, which I believe uses additional texture layers.

[raevol]

which I believe uses additional texture layers.

Ooooh interesting, ok.