Any chance to get better shadows and AA with 3.0?

[Lc4Hunter]

Hy Egosoft

maybe you will read this and maybe wou will answer this:
Because of many reasons i put the game away in december... now i thought i could try again and the first thing i saw was the same i saw at release: very bad shadows in the Homescreen (where the Disco lands at the pad).
I tried a lot of settings but the shadows are still bad... they get rough after a very short distance (settings are all set to high) and they are also flickering while flying straight forward.

I´m sorry but i don´t think this is ok for a game that has been released for more then 9 month... and for a game today this is definitely not contemporary.
Same with the AA-settings which don´t bring good results and some other bugs, already reported multiple times, like falling through the bottom of the ship after standing up.

Is there any chance you´re working on this "issues", too?
The reason i´m asking: I saw these bad shadows also in the Vendetta Trailer multiple times. For example at 28 seconds when the camera flies around the Split-Ship... or at 44 seconds in the cockpit of the fighter...

Thanks in advance and best regards,
Hunter

[Outliver]

So, as for the shadows, I can confirm this.

I don't really know anything about how those things work in the game, but looking closer at those shadows, I believe, this is rather an issue of the way Vulkan handles soft, ray-traced shadows and reflections. If so, I'm afraid, egosoft won't be able to fix that at all. And we would rather have to wait for an update of the Vulkan API itself or maybe even graphics drivers.

Regarding the aliasing, I suppose, it's very similar. Anyway, if you have a graphics card that's powerful enough, supersampling (selecting SSAA as the anti-aliasing method in the graphics settings) really did the trick for me. I know, it's a post-fix, workaround kinda thing and it's really heavy on performance but it works for me (in most cases, at least).

[Imperial Good]

I believe, this is rather an issue of the way Vulkan handles soft, ray-traced shadows and reflections

Vulkan is a graphics API. It does not handle shadows at all, it just allows developers to use graphic hardware. They might use the graphic hardware to generate shadows, but how they do that is up to them. This is the point of programmable shaders and in no way is Vulkan limiting with them. It certainly is less limited that D3D11, 12 and OpenGL.

Shadows are very difficult to compute in real time. Since real time raytracing for general lighting is still not a viable idea, shadows have to be calculated using hacky techniques. A solid shadow casting implementation is very hard to make and certainly not something you can expect a small development team to pull off first try.

I am aware RTX cards promise realtime raytracing. They do deliver but only for some types of effect such as reflections which were near impossible or not viable to accurately simulate before. Even the RTX 2080 TI is not powerful enough for real time full scene raytracing at a good quality level and frame rate. For now real time raytracing is limited to hybrid use, where most of the scene is traditional graphics with some subtle elements calculated with real time raytracing.

[radcapricorn]

A solid shadow casting implementation is very hard to make and certainly not something you can expect a small development team to pull off first try.

You should probably contact Flavien Brebion and tell him that. OTOH, his engine's been "in the making" for well over a decade now, whereas Ego released three "new" games in that period.

[Alan Phipps]

I'm not really seeing an X4 technical issue in the current discussion here. I would guess that much will depend on the system hardware, drivers and settings in use but since that information was not provided by the OP, there is little to attract dev attention to this topic.

[radcapricorn]

Aside from falling through floor issue, which, even though mentioned, isn't in title of this thread, and apparently will be fixed in the future update, I'd say that neither AA nor shadows, as they are right now, are "bugs".

That said, the game would definitely benefit from improving both. Temporal AA, at the very least, could be a massive step forward. Still glory screenshots are nice and all, but the cinematic department suffers a great deal from all those crawling pixels.

[chew-ie]

As I stumbled across it ingame - I think the current looks of shadows are somewhat "intentional" as the blurry shadows seem to be coded.


Blurry Shadow gets very sharp after a very short distance


...and get blurry again for no apparent "need"

The same can be observed on moving npcs. They can look a lot better - if distance & camera are set accordingly.

The shadow in the main menu should be sharper if we move the camera closer / rotate it to certain degrees. So at least it doesn't look like technical limitations. Maybe it's due to a compromise we aren't aware of.

edit: tested shadows & camera while one of my M-ships were docking on a carrier. Docking procedure looked really nice with proper shadows once I got the "right" angle.