My shadows have suddenly disappeared. That is to say that when standing in an open area and looking into another area where a shadow should be (such as an awning or a bridge) there are no shadows. Yet when I move into an are where there should be shadow (underneath a bridge/beside a wall etc) the entire worldspace is covered in darkness. How do I get these shadows to actually shadow what they are meant to? Is this a known bug?

To clarify I've uninstalled any mods that might alter light or weather and removed all traces of ENB (as far as I can tell anyway) does anyone have any pointers? I miss having a dark Skyrim.

Bump

Rename your Skyrim.ini and SkyrimPrefs.ini. Then start the game, let the game create new ini files. And see if that solves the problem.

No solve for this still. I have been fighting with Bethesda about this issue since march when the released update 1.5. in march. I had already created a post for this exact issue http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1361153-update-15-shadows-are-invisable-move-with-camera-have-lines-issue-possably-figured-out/ . I have been escelated to tier 2 for over a month and they seem to not have any desire to assist in this anymore. I'm guessing they don't care. they know what they did to cause the issue they just do not want to correct it. 1.4.27 and all previous versions work fine. To be honest I just re installed the game today after uninstalling it for a month in hopes that they fixed it. since they have done neither fixed nor contacted me I feel it is time to part ways with Bethesda. It was a nice run but I own them nothing and now choose to no longer support there business by buying future games.

Deleting .inis does nothing; but the thing is though, the shadows didn't break immediately after 1.5 but after I'd been downloading some enb mods and the likes. But even after fully removing them it's still broken? it makes me quite sad

Check the Data folder for any rogue INI files, as well.

Milne, if it worked before, then stopped working when you installed the enb mods, I would guess it has to do something with that. Maybe you didn't uninstall it properly. I think the enb series are awesome value for the money (as they are free). But the documentation and support are lacking a bit. (I hope Boris will not come and slap me on the wrist here. ) I assume Boris enjoys writing all those cool visual tools, but wants to dedicate less time to installation/uninstall tools and up-to-date documentation.

That being said, I think it's easy to forget a file or dll when uninstalling things. There's also a chance that you forgot about a change you made in your inis, but you ruled that out already. If I were you, I'd double check if all enbseries files have been removed. Especially dlls. The only other thing I can think of next is uninstalling the game, cleaning your My Documents/My Games/Skyrim folder, and reinstalling. (Yeah, I would hate that too. I got a worse job for myself tomorrow: re-installing Windows and everything else ....).
I have no other ideas, sorry. And as I have a nVidia card, I am not up to date with any issues with AMD cards.

Fair enough I'll give it another look, I'll let you guys know the outcome whenever I get this done!

I think bethesda is paying people to or commenting themselves. EMB has nothing to do with it. No .ini files will change it. I un installed the game. re installed the game. reformated my hard drive and reinstalled my OS. installed a fresh copy of the game let it update to 1.5.26 and the issue is still there. this has everything to do with 1.5 and nothing to do with your settings or anything else. stop trying to point the finger at anyone other than yourselves Bethesda. the update 1.5 and 1.5.26 both have a new way they display shadows or actually lighting. its the EXE file. if you have the 1.4.27 or earlyer exe file you can get the shadows to display correctly but some features of the game will be broken like smithing. they changed smithing in 1.5 so you cant level it up if you use the 1.4.27.exe Bethesda Knows of this issue but they refuse to do anything about it. they are trying to make it where people will just stop playing who have the problem because the EU has copyright laws. you can get your money back for games that are unfit like this one but since its registered to a steam account now you cant. Bethesda got there money from you and now you offer nothing to them. why would they make it worth there time to correct an issue? are you going to pay them again?

I think Bethesda's competitors (Activision, EA, Sony, Ubisoft, etc) are paying people to post negative comments here !

To be honest, I think both ideas are nonsense. People post here what they hope is useful to others.
I am running Skryim without any problems at all.
Well, that's maybe not completely true. I could hardly play the game without SkyUI. I've installed the Unofficial Skrym Pack (with fixes for bugs in quests) and never seen a quest-related bug. I keep my machine clean. I don't mess around with it unless I have problem that needs to be fixed with an upgrade. I regularly move old SaveFiles to another folder, to keep not more than 50-100 SaveFiles in the save folder. I don't mess with ini files, or else I keep copies of the previous ini-settings around to revert back if needed. I only use addons when I really want them. I intentionally don't do SLI or CF. I didn't overclock my CPU. I have a powerful PSU. Simple stuff. But it works. My game runs fine.

Castel, did you install an older version of the exe (and other code, like dlls). If you look around on the web, I am sure you can find older versions of the game. If you are correct, and only the exe is to blame, did you verify this by reverting ? If you haven't done that, then you are only guessing. And your guess is as good as mine.

BTW, does Bethesda not care about your customer satisfaction ? Because you already paid ?
Bethesda is a company that hopes to continue for many more years. They hope to sell more games to you. That is why they care. Example: I paid a lot of money to Blizzard/Activision. But in the end, I was very very unhappy about what I got for the money. I will never spend a cent on Activision products again. So I won't play more WoW, I didn't buy Starcraft, I won't play Diablo3. But you can bet your [censored] that I will buy and play Elder Scrolls 6 !

If you did read the original thread quoted by Castel, you would not suggest this.

Patch 1.5 did introduce a serious and very annoying shadow bug for older video cards, mostly ATI, but also Nvidia, cards perfectly able to run DX9.
And yes, reverting only the skyrim.exe back to 1.4 solves this, but probably breaks lots of other things (smithing etc.)

If we did not have Steam, people could revert easy to an older version, but now your money and game are gone.

Maybe they could use the steam beta feature to go back to version 1.4 ?