EDIT:

Problem solved! A whole lot of thanks to the people responsible, you know who you are!


Hey folks

I'd love a mod that takes care of the poor implementation of the animation of the direct sun shadows.

Here's a video of the problem:
http://www.youtube.c...h?v=yXgF_IDpFNI

Currently they jump to a new position every 10-15 seconds, which looks odd and kinda kills my suspension of disbelief. If you set the time scale to about 350, you'll note that sun shadows could (at least in theory) flow continuously without interruption.

If someone could point me in the right direction on how to mod this or do the mod themselves, I'd love to hear about it.

Best
y

I know in the grand scheme of things some people might find this a very small issue, but I would LOVE to see this fixed somehow. Whether or not the continuously updating sun shadows would cause a performance hit or not I couldnt say, Im not that familiar with the inner working of graphics engines.

+1

+1

But I do understand the reason the vanilla is done the way it is, shadows take a lot of calculating and they have done it this way to reduce load on the cpu, but I think an update about every 20 to 30ms should be fine, at least for medium to high end systems.

I forgot to mention it, but when setting timescale to 350 and thus making the animation almost continuous the fps don't seem to change, but I didn't measure it, so I could be wrong.

Problem solved! A whole lot of thanks to the people responsible, you know who you are!

I've spent the better part of last evening trying to find the sweet spot for these settings (almost 3 hours). While I wasn't successful per se, I did find out the following:

Settings I use now, shadows move slowly without jittering, but not smooth either:
fSunShadowUpdateTime=0
fSunUpdateThreshold=0.025

Completely deactivate movement:
fSunShadowUpdateTime=-1
fSunUpdateThreshold=(whatever, has no influence any longer)

Continuous animation but an s-load of jittering:
fSunShadowUpdateTime=1
fSunUpdateThreshold=-0.5

A combination of the two, but to be honest, I don't see much difference with the options for continuous animation:
fSunShadowUpdateTime=0.05
fSunUpdateThreshold=0.025

Conclusion
It appears, but I'm pretty sure there is more to it, that fSunShadowUpdateTime isn't the interval for when the shadow updates but rather how long the animation of the updating will last. fSunUpdateThreshold on the other hand seems to be the value that decides when the update happens, I guess the threshold has something to do with the angle of the sun changing, or rather, after how many degrees of increasing the angle the update should happen. But, these are pretty much wild guesses, as These values seem to correlate somehow or are interdependant. Changing one value effects the way the other behaves and so forth. It was quite frustrating to be honest.

If anyone has further insights, I'd be interested to hear!

u need to alter the timescale of the whole game if u want the shadows to stop moving every 20 secs

well when i changed the timescale from 30 to 10 it didnt update as often
but for me the days are too long with 10 so somewhere in the middle might be good

Not entirely true. While the timescale certainly has a great influence on the passing of time generally, the options above control how often the shadow is updated relative to the timescale.

Additionally, changing the timescale to anything else than the default seriously messes with the game. Quests can stop working and I've had the case that my in game time is off by two in game hours. Instead of the in game date changing at midnight, it now changes at 10 pm.

I recommend leaving the timescale alone and wait for mod that implements it properly.

Would you mind posting your findings in my thread and/or giving me permission to copy them into the original post?

Just wondering if there was much of a performance hit from this?

Of course not, these findings are for everyone so the news needs to spread! Though it's nice of you to ask, I don't care much for intellectual ownership and such things. Knowledge should be free for everyone imo.

Which thread did you mean exactly, your INI thread?



None that I know of, but since I didn't notice anything doesn't mean it isn't there. I suppose if you noticed stuttering every time the shadow position updates, then yes, it would get worse as the shadow position is now (almost) continuously updated.

My preferred way to deactivate movement:
fSunShadowUpdateTime=0
fSunUpdateThreshold=7

A high second value makes the interval is so long that you are bound to have fast traveled, gone dungeon diving or rested/waited when the shadows would update. For example, with a value of 12, shadows will update every 5ish minutes (real time) and will be at most 2ish hours
(game time) behind the sun. This means 10pm's shadows would hang around 'till midnight and is more natural than disabling all movement for ever.

I've never actually noticed them moving, so they must've been doing it while I wasn't looking.

Nice, also a very good idea, I'm sure some people would prefer this to completely deactivating movement. But I think the title of "My preferred way to deactivate movement" is a little misleading, it's implying that movement is off, when it's really only slowed down a lot.

These settings work great! Not quite realtime, but close enough to look a lot better than default. Good job on figuring them out!

Glad you like it and thanks!

Sorry for being a bit dense, but which ini file do I add "fSunShadowUpdateTime=0 and fSunUpdateThreshold=0" to? Is it the SkyrimRim prefs one or the other ini in the same folder?

In the skyrim.ini like so

[display]fSunShadowUpdateTime=0fSunUpdateThreshold=0.025

I think the initial post in this thread makes it pretty clear, no?

Sorry - massive sleep deprivation.

Directly under sD3DDevice="NVIDIA GeForce GTS 250" ? Will give it a go, thank you.

Haha, it's alright, no worries.

But no, the line you mentioned is in the SkyrimPrefs.ini file, I'm saying add it to the other file called Skyrim.ini. If you don't have a heading called [display] in there, just add it somewhere.

To be honest, it could very well be that it doesn't matter which file you add it to because I've seen the same values in both files. Seems like the one takes precedence over the other, so if you have the same variable in both files with different values, the one will overwrite the other. But don't ask me which one comes first

Yep, seems to have done the job, shadows look better. Thanks for the info. You know, I created a thread months ago voicing concerns that the shadow system would end up this way, pity they were so well founded. Hope the CK gets released soon so someone can create a timescale mod, that will help a lot. Oh, tried setting the timescale to 350 and didn't notice any fps hit either. Looked pretty cool actually.

Woah, didn't know this would be as easy as an INI tweak. Thanks!

While looking almost real-time-esque, unfortunately the shadows flicker. It's driving me nuts.

Agree. Definitely not optimal, but far better than vanilla imo. Hopefully Beth or a mod will do a better job of this at some point.

[Display]
fSunShadowUpdateTime=0
fSunUpdateThreshold=0.025
iBlurDeferredShadowMask=3
fInteriorShadowDistance=3000.0000
-snip-

I donno, it doesn't seem to be doing any differences unless that 10x time change mod overrides it, by default time is 20x, 10x makes the game hours twice as long.

-edit- I did a test after unticking the timescale10x mod and time is default again but still jumps every few seconds