Hello LM - Do you forget something in the Menu of V4 ?

[WinstonWolf]

Hello ,
I miss an Point in Menu of the v4 .
Under Graphics / Lightning / Shadows
I miss the Settings for Terrain Shadow Cast Distance , Cloud Shadow Cast Distance and Object Shadow Cast Distance ?!?!?


v4 :


v3 :


Thanks
Michael

[Saldo]

I am curious too ..

[Beau Hollis]

In v4, we added particles shadow support so that things like smoke stacks can cast shadows. This further complicated the cast draw settings. Rather than adding a fourth bar, we simplified the UI to use preset distance ranges, different combinations of slider settings could have complex interactions. There was a great deal of confusion in the past because, for example, increasing your terrain draw distance would reduce the quality of your object shadows. There are some ways to further tune shadows via the cfg file, but i don't recall the details.

[Kevin Cartrette]

Hey All,

We simplified the options for the shadow distances as Beau mentioned. We now handle calculating the actual distances based on checked options. We already were not fully respecting all the sliders distances if certain flags were selected in V3 since behind the scenes there are only two shadow map cascades. One shadow map cascade is for opaque objects and one for translucent objects for the sun and moon directional shadows.

You are not losing any functionality by the reduced settings and may be gaining better cascade mappings in the case of bad flag and distance settings.

The advanced Prepar3D.cfg options Beau alluded to inside the Graphics section:

OPAQUE_SHADOW_TEXTURE_SIZE=2048
TRANSLUCENT_SHADOW_TEXTURE_SIZE=512
OPAQUE_SHADOW_DRAW_DISTANCE=2000
TRANSLUCENT_SHAD0W_DRAW_DISTANCE=2000
SHADOW_LOG_PARTITION_LOW=0.850000
SHADOW_LOG_PARTITION_MID=0.850000
SHADOW_LOG_PARTITION_HIGH=0.850000
SHADOW_LOG_PARTITION_ULTRA=0.850000

Thanks,
-Kevin.

[WinstonWolf]

Hello and thank you for the very detailled answer .
This means that the two sliders does the same as the four sliders ?


Greetings from Bavaria
Nice Work . Congratulations .