The Harvest Moon Consortium

[Pstemarie]

Thanx
...but at big locations with lots of placeable still appears lot of shadow traces.

There's the culprit - your placeables are casting shadows onto the hill plane which ranges from 0 to whatever height the hill climbs to. Placeables (and creatures) cast a flat shadow at elevation 0 or elevation 1.

Elevation height is defined in the tileset's .set file. For example the City Exterior tileset has an elevation height of 4 (or 400 mm). The ground plane is at elevation 0 (or 0 mm).

Using these figures for City Exterior as an example, if you paint a placeable on a hill at a height between 0 - 400 mm, the shadow will be painted at the 0mm height (the base ground plane). If the placeable is painted above 400 mm, then its shadow will be painted at the 400mm height (the elevated ground plane as defined in the .set file).

Because shadows are painted along a horizontal, two-dimensional plane they produce artifacts on hill surfaces. This is due to a portion of the shadow being underneath the visible surface of the hill.

The only way to completely remove shadows is to turn them off in the game settings.

[Guest]

strange
in that case how other have fixed this bug by turning off only hill's shadows?

[Pstemarie]

strange
in that case how other have fixed this bug by turning off only hill's shadows?

Note, this is my understanding of how shadows for placeables work - which is what is apparently causing your artifacts. Tileset shadows might be structured differently. I really don't know for sure. What I do know is that when you think you've got shadows figured out - the "rules" seem to change or an exception comes along.

Have you tried making a copy of the area and removing all placeables from it. This way you may be able to track down exactly where the artifacts are coming from.

[Guest]

yes of course
After switching off shadows for hills there is much less shadow traces at clean location with only hills and basic grass terrain, without placeables. But they are still appears

When I'm placing placeables on location - quantity of traces starts to increase

[Bannor Bloodfist]

Shadows cause issues. Period.

CTP fought them, and fought them, and finally gave up.

Aurora is an OLD engine. It does NOT handle shadows well.

You are fighting yourself and ALL the old authors.

Turn environment shadows off in the game options.

Then move on.

Believe me, I KNOW it sucks. We, CTP, collectively, spent hundreds of hours fixing shadows... then we found that certain things just can NOT be fixed in the tiles, as it is caused by placeables etc... the game engine has two different shadow casting bits to it... one for the area itself (IE tiles) BEFORE all placeables are painted, then an additional one that gets run when the placeables are painted (displayed).

You can slice the tiles up into multiple pieces, and adjust the pivot location (pivot is what is used as the actual shadow casting bit) for each individual piece. However, the more pieces, the harder it is to get them all to connect their shadows together properly. Just a 10th of a millimeter off and it looks like total crap in game. The other issue, is having all those separate faces for the objects, means your textures require a HUGE amount of work to get them to align correctly, and you lose the auto-rotate features for grass, dirt whatever, so you can easily see the tile edges in game.

It is simply NOT worth the heartache. Bioware gave up on it themselves due to the amount of time and effort, AND computing power required to get it all to work 'right'.

They have moved on to a completely different game engine now, one that handles some bits better, some bits worse... all a matter of opinion I guess, but their newer game engines utilize the power of the newer graphics cards much better, so things can look better, if the artist takes the time to do some QA on the work before releasing it.

[senemenelas]

i drastically solved shadows issues just by completely disabling em from options page in game

[Pstemarie]

i drastically solved shadows issues just by completely disabling em from options page in game

I solved em too - turn em of then set all the lighting to black

[Guest]

thats all sounds sadly =(


anyway, thanks for help.

Typical hills can be fixed by replacing with more old version of hills (and it is not a big problem that they are much more "square"), but roads will be true lose =\ ... just never mind ))