As in the title, why are there still no shadows for static objects, it's not as if the engine is pushing the use of gpu's to the limit, I'm using an HD5870 and gpu usage rarely gets above 50%.

Now some of you may say that shadows are not a big deal and normally I might agree, until that is your standing by an external wall that's between your character and the sun, but low and behold the sun still shines on your character.

Obsidian have added new house models that can be used in external cells, these would be great but for one problem, when inside them the sun shines on your character still and the walls of the house, come on!, with all the tweaks to the engine you apparantly did, you left out shadows, why?

That was a long sentance..

`I was thinking the same thing the other day.
However, When I looked closely.. I saw shadows. Just not on the larger objects.

Edit: I just understood what you fully meant.
That IS a little weird. But it's not like it bothers me. Ussually, If I noticed at all, I would just assume the sun was on the other side of me. I didn't take the time to look up and see where the sun was positioned.

They are static shadows built into the models, you will notice they don't shift with the suns position.

But you quoted it non the less, do you have some feedback on the subject?

I never noticed the shadows, i think the game looks fine despit the older engine.. I have no complaints at all, and i prefer to be able to run this game at 60fps then 30 fps like on crysis. I have an Ati 4890 OC, not the newest but still pretty good, and if this game ran like Crysis did, i dont think i could play for 60 hours because my eyeballs would pop outa my head, and the lack of AA use would drive me crazy... I dont like playing games with the best graphics possible because it only caters to a small percentage of people who can run it like that.

Maybe shadows the way you want them would just make the game run like crap i dont know ? Sometimes shadows really kill the fps.. Take World of Warcraft for example.. Yea yea i know, but its an example when WOW introduced impressive shadows to the game fps dropped 2 fold for everyone, and most people dont use it.

Shadows are very resource intensive, particularly with the amount of clutter in the game. While this might not be a problem for most newer gaming computers the engine has to work on the XBox 360 and PS3 as well.

I also imagine Obsidian's priorities were elsewhere - rather than spending lots of time upgrading the graphical engine they put their programming resources more in to expanding the game's feature set.

OH NOES NO SHADOWS?

Who cares?

Like he said^ they svck up way to much time and dev cycle and the consoles likely cant handle it.

In fact, I don;t think I ever even noticed until i read this thread.

I read somewhere that the engine can support shadows, and at one point they were enabled in Oblivion. Performance suffered greatly though so only characters have shadows (shadow maps) in the shipping game. Some engines handle shadows better than others, like the RDR/GTAIV one. Except for GTAIV on PC.. performance suffers heavily with shadows on everything but the lowest (ugly) quality

Simply put, while not photo realistic or anything like the real world, the graphics in this game are fine by me the way they are. They convey the world and I think that's what they're supposed to do.

I'm happy with the lack of shadows, which don't affect my enjoyment of the game at all. Then again, I don't worry about character animations or FPS, either, so it's not like my opinion means anything.

Clutter can be ignored for the most part, just things like walls, specifically larger static objects, my character is currently in a house and casting a shadow on the floor, the only light source is the sun, there should be no shadow unless he is standing in the doorway, as for resource and performance, static shadows could have the same options as actor shadows, off, low, medium or high.

And please don't get me wrong when I say this, but I do not believe it right some of us are held back because of consoles, I've nothing against consoles, each to their own, but I know I'm not alone when I say some of us have patiently saved over a long period to get a system that can deliver both quality and performance.

How on earth is a lack of shadows holding anyone back, it's so unimportant to me that I hadn't even noticed. I'd rather developers spent more time on gameplay and story and less time worrying about making the graphics perfect to satisfy people who can't seem to get immersed into a game unless it looks like a movie. I'd rather play a good text adventure than a bad movie.

The problem is that programming those shadows into the game would require the use of resources that were spent on other aspects. So what game features would you be willing to give up to get the shadows? What features should be cut so a minority of a minority of people who play the game can have better shadows? PC gamers are a minority of the people playing FO:NV and PC gamers with powerful systems, such as you and I, are a minority of that. Would it really make sense to cut features that everyone can enjoy so we can have a few shadows? Especially since the vast majority of players don't seem to notice the problem.

Doing a little reading, the engine does have the capability, it was originally intended for use in Oblivion but performance issues caused them to disable the feature, in other words it's still in the engine but not utilized, so there is no question of dev resource/time it's a question of it being re-enabled, perhaps there is someone out there with the knowledge to do this?

The engine looks bad, I agree, but honestly, with that kind of timeframe, I'm glad they didn't really tweak it too much. We already have enough complaining about bugs and performance...

Sorry to burst your bubble, its just not that simple. Just because the engine is capable does not mean you can just flip a switch and turn it on. While I haven't worked with this engine myself, my experience with others tells me getting it to work properly would likely still take quite a bit of work.

something i hated about being a stealthy charater in the gamebryo games was that the games always stated that to remain hidden you needed to stay in the shadows


shadows? really? you mean there was actually shadows in the game engine to use to stay hidden? translation would state, stay out of the areas where its not lit up by any lights..cause we got a dymanic lighting system that apparently isnt complimented by a dynamic shadow system...so just stay away from brighter areas?

im still waiting for them to upgrade the stealth system, which i dont see ever happening anymore since they are moving to a whole new engine all together. but i woulda loved to had to take into account by moving from shadow to shadow to avoid detection.

To some of you mentioning time and resource, as I've already posted, the feature already exists within the engine, it's just been disabled, I know that someone managed to re-enable it for Oblivion, I'm using this thread in the hope someone can do it for FO:NV
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eKzwKFlz8Y

The reason why there's no shadows for objects in the game is because Obsidian didn't really enhance the graphics at all. Now, I'm mostly fine with the graphics in Fallout 3, they're not really impressive compared to newer games, of course, but for the most part, I can accept them, though some of the textures could do with improving, but that's something modders can fix easily enough, however, I wouldn't have objected if shadows for statics were added into the game, mods can't do that so easily, but obviously, Obsidian decided not to do that, which seems kind of like a pointless decision in retrospect, seeing as the game was still buggy, you'd think that if they didn't bother updating the engine at all, they could have made the game more stable, seeing as they were working with technology already tried with Fallout 3, their programmers could focus more on polishing the game's coding since they didn't have to spend time on updating the engine, maybe that would even have happened if this game were made by a different company, but evidently, the qualifications programmer's and testers need to meet to be hired at Obsidian are the same as for Bethesda, which judging from the stability of their games I'd guess are pretty low, add that the game is running on an engine programmed by Bethesda, I guess hoping for a game that wouldn't have lots of bugs would have been pretty foolish. In fact, maybe that's why they couldn't do shadows, maybe on a better programmed engine, dynamic shadows for statics could have been done on consoles, but the current engine is just not that good.

Though personally, I'd say it's about time they entirely abandoned the Gamebryo engine, it's an old engine already, and their attempts to use it have been consistently buggy. Sure, they can update it, it's pretty clear that they updated it somewhat from Oblivion to Fallout 3, but eventually, there comes a time when you just have to abandon old technologies in favor of something newer, I would say that time has come with the current engine, maybe in the next game...



And yet in the recent games I've played on the Xbox 360, there has always been dynamic shadows for things other than characters. Besides, they could always allow players to activate full dynamic shadows as an option on the PC version but have it not active on the console versions, but I guess they can't do that, after all, that requires actually doing something for the PC version that's not in the console version...

Or if shadows for clutter would ruin the performance on the console versions, maybe they could just do them for environment objects like buildings, trees, rocks and such, because while I can usually ignore a coffee mug not casting a shadow, standing in the shade of a building yet not actually finding any shade at all kind of hurts the atmosphere of the game, really, I'd actually say these things should get priority BEFORE characters when it comes to casting shadows, yet in Oblivion, Fallout 3, and New Vegas, characters are the only things that cast shadows.

Agreed. There are options for tree canopy shadows (part of SpeedTree) and self shadowing, but enabling them does nothing in game. They were used in Oblivion, but the trees there had leaves and self shadowing was broken (so it is disabled by default)

As RunningBare stated though, objects do have shadows built into the models and these shadows change depending on the position of the sun. The lack of shadows never bothered me personally and like other I had no idea until it was pointed out! Even early reviews of Fallout 3 stated the 360 version had 'stronger shadows' then the PS3 version but this referred to the model shadows which are not shadows at all and also the reviewers failed to realized the 360 version's default gamma is too low!

well lets all be happy that the next iterations in the fallout series and elder scroll series will definitely have dynamic shadows on ALL objects.

just glad they are finally dumping this bug ridden collision detection and clipping error engine for one thats at least worth a dam. with the exception to that being any mmo they decide to release

Because they're gonna make you feel like you're the only girl in the world!"

I remember this topic coming up when Oblivion was about to release. I can't find it now, but one of the Oblivion devs said that after they did all of the work for the dynamic soft shadows and realized it was too much for the hardware of the time they had to start over and re-do the way the shadows worked. People were asking why they couldn't just allow it to be an option on the PC version, and they said it was too integrated into the game code to simply switch back and forth between the shadow methods easily. Of course, I don't know how true any of that is, but that was their explanation.

The way this engine renders everything is a little bit different than most other game engines. A lot more needs to be dynamic due to the nature of the open world, whereas in other more static types of games a lot of the calculations for things like shadows can be done ahead of time so there's not as much work for the hardware to do at runtime.

I think there was a glitch in the matrix. I was just thinking the same thing as i was walking through the courtyard of the NCRCF. It was a bright sun shiny day and i'm looking at the tables and other objects scattered around thinking, "where are the shadows that would totally add a bit more of realism and depth to this world?".

I'll have to go back and check, didn't FO3 have shadow effects? I'm pretty sure it did. Oh well! Maybe they'll attempt to improve FO4 with a new engine that will add shadow effects. If they don't use a new engine for the next Fallout, i won't be wasting my money.

that sounds a little like bull to me...there is no reason to make the option available on the pcand that too integrated is just [censored].

i bet it had something to do with another game mechanic breaking or not functioning correctly at all. Take stealth for isntance, i bet they couldnt incorporate a method for npc's to distinguish between players hidden in the dynamic shadows from the other parts of teh gameworld, as if the npc's couldn't tell darker areas from brighter areas.

but no, it could never be a dev teams incompetence or lack of ability in finding a solution, it can never be that...quick whats a good excuse...uhhhh lets go with hardware...wait what about pc's they are always upgraded..ah good point find another excuse..something technical so they wont question it.