Will the final release use polygonal shadows, or vertex shadows?

[Falkon Swiftblade]

I was wondering why shadows are still being used with what seems to be vertex shadows, and wondered since Unity supports in engine real time polygon shadows and there's not really that much going on for processing, nor is polygon shadows much strain on the computer and would look a lot nicer, could we have an option to toggle shadows in game? Or would it be too much to ask for a tiny particle emitter to be created to shoot out a dark shadow under the feet of the player to help them feel more grounded in the world? Some shadows in game are way way too strong, while others feel pretty reasonable, but it seems like ya guys are faking the shadows and I don't know why. Granted they do work MUCH nicer in 5.0, but still seem pretty decent in 4.6 as well.

 

 

Ooops. I posted this in the wrong thread. Mod you can move this if you need to. Also I had a typo in the title, it should be real time polygon and not polygonal.

Edited March 15, 2015 by Falkon Swiftblade

[Falkon Swiftblade]

worst case scenario, in older versions of unity you could lower the shadow intensity very quickly so they weren't so intense. I imagine it's probably even more efficient now.

[Sensuki]

Performance already struggles enough as it is IMO. I'd rather see them improve that before they add anything else that could make it worse.

[Falkon Swiftblade]

just out of curiosity Sensuki, what is the speed of your hard drive? I suspect you're using one that's 5400 and I bet if it were 7200 or even an ssd drive it would be much faster. Since the game is basically only loading one humongous image, there's not a ton of stuff going on in the game and I think your performance hits are related to the read write capacity of your hd. 

[Sensuki]

7200RPM. I haven't tested running it on an SSD yet, because my steam install folder is on one of my 1TB drives and my system drive is an OCZ Vertex 2 from 2009.

 

I plan on upgrading my computer so I don't get pissed off with the bad performance, so I may look into installing it on an SSD when I do that.

 

When there are no units visible on the screen - the game runs at 90-100 FPS or more in every map, except the Temple of Skaen. When there are units on the screen it drops HEAPS, sometimes by up to 40-50 FPS.

 

My understanding is that the level is loaded during the level load, so the background probably wouldn't have much (or any) impact on performance. It doesn't load the level until it's loaded into the memory.

Edited March 16, 2015 by Sensuki

[Sensuki]

Also there is a lot of stuff that is running every single frame, they have too many update() methods - hopefully they eventually refactor some of that.

[Adam Brennecke]

I'm not exactly sure what you are asking - we use shadow mapping which is an industry standard technique, and will not be changing this for release. We rolled our own shadow system because Unity's shadow solution does not work with our rendering pipeline. I would like to improve the quality of the shadows, and I agree that things can look better, but it's low on my list of things to do. 

[Falkon Swiftblade]

I'm not exactly sure what you are asking - we use shadow mapping which is an industry standard technique, and will not be changing this for release. We rolled our own shadow system because Unity's shadow solution does not work with our rendering pipeline. I would like to improve the quality of the shadows, and I agree that things can look better, but it's low on my list of things to do. 

 

Basically I was hoping for dynamic shadows, or possibly worst case scenario some of the areas can lower the intensity of the shadow map. With such a strong shadow it indicates a very high light source such as 11am-2pm vs a softer shadow for a more ambiguous time of day, and it helps remove some of the visual clutter on screen when you have a full party.

[Adam Brennecke]

We try to match the dynamic character shadows to the rendered 2D image to make the illusion that the characters are standing in the scene. Therefore we can't adjust the shadows too much.