2007-02-20 18:13:10 Shadows look a bit assy?

Is this a hardware based limitation of the 360? It's consistent throughout every game I own that the shadows look really rubbish around the edges, and it's especially noticable on closeups, for instance in Gears when you see Marcus face up close and the edges on the shadows are all jittery.

Kameo and GRAW2 are two more games that spring to mind that have the same "issue". It's like the one thing that keeps a lot of these games from looking "perfect", so I'm wondering if it's something that can be ironed out.

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http://www.gamespot.com/users/SimonM7 - AETOA Gamespot

2007-02-20 19:33:44

Stencil Shadows give the hard, clean edges while Shadow Maps can sometimes give the aliased edges if not a high enough resolutions. To compound the issue games are using different shadow techiques for different parts of the game. e.g. Precomputed static shadows for the world geometry, another technique for silouette shadows, and yet another for self shadows.

Another issue is the lack of a basic filter for shadows. That said there are many techniques to clean up shadows and a lot of games use them and will be. Especially as quality soft shadowing becomes the norm. I agree that shadows are important to games, the entire lighitng and shadowing model and balance can make a HUGE graphical impact, more so even than texture work.

On Gears, it kind of went unnoticed in the press that the technology in Gears was downsized from the initial demos to launch. It cut back a number of features (performance?) and is actually quite similar to HL2 in regards to how they go about things. Hopefully GOW2 makes some big steps in this area... as well as Mass Effect. ME has some of the worse self shadowing artifacting I have seen. HORRIBLE.

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Optimusv2 said: "Gun for the 360 has better graphics than both Halo 3 and Gears of War"

2007-02-20 19:35:31

I have seen it in a few PS3 games too :ie Motorstorm demo.

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R.J.S 1965-2007 PSN ID:SgtSpud

2007-02-20 21:27:47

Hmm yes Blue Dragon's Shadowing isn't half as good as i had hoped for.

I guess we can't have it all :( (maybe next gen ey ?)

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Marumaro for the WIN !!

2007-02-20 22:10:56

Yea I notice a lot of imperfections, but as long as it they nail the general vision of what they are going for I wont be disappointed.

Carmack said before had they not demanded this hi def thing he could've done mindblowing things with shadows.

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Hironobu Sakaguchi is coming back to reclaim the throne :)

October 20th 2007 (A good day)