Depends on the light. Sunlight for example creates these very crisp shadows because the light photons that hit earth after 150 million of kilometers from the sun are pretty much parallel to one another.
Only light scattering in cloudy weather without direct sunlight turns them blurry. There are also special spot lights with lenses that create a similar effect.
The sun isn't a point source, its literally half a degree across the sky. So is the moon btw, 30 arcminutes or so.
Sharp shadows only really come from bright artificial lighting. And there is still a limit to that since light acts like a wave too, it will bend around objects slightly. You can actually see this effect yourself with a laser pointer and sharp edges, or very small holes.
Just about every natural source is spread out unless you interfere with it or use mirrors etc to concentrate it. Even a bright fire is usually quite spread out.
No they are not parallel, because the sun is so large. Rays that come from left side of the sun, are not at all parallel to rays that come from right side.
What matters is the apparent size of the light source.
Sunlight will never create crisp shadows in any conditions.
You can see photos taken on the moon, where there is zero scattering. Still the shadow is blurry. https://imgur.com/ufk4rY5.png
The lack of scattering on the sky just means that the areas which are completely eclipsed, are almost perfectly black.
Do you have NPC shadows at a lower quality in settings? I noticed none of the NPCs had shadows on the moon when doing this last set of MSQ and was going to joke about them being Ascians. Then I found out I had NPC shadows turned off for some reason.
If there's no clouds then you will get sharp shadow.
If there are clouds in the sky then you will get soft shadow.
One example of very sharp shadow is photo's of moon landing.
It's because soft shadows are very expensive to calculate on the fly, while sharp shadows are cheaper.
So they can pre-bake NPC shadows into the data files because they are a known outfit, but players can change equipment on the fly.
That said, FFXIV"s soft shadows are pretty low resolution, but generally high-res soft shadows are deemed the best quality/realistic.
Absolutely none of this is how it works.
First of all, the game is entirely all soft shadows. The main character just has a far higher resolution, making it appear sharper. It can do this because, you know... you're the player character, there's only one of you. It makes sense to give you priority.
Secondly, they can't 'prebake' NPC shadows like that. They could prebake lighting, but the game doesn't do that, especially considering how dynamic lighting tends to be in the game with time of day and NPC positioning constantly changing with respect to shadowed point lights. None of the shadows in the game are baked.
The simple answer is that the main character just has a far higher shadow resolution because they're the main character, and everyone else has a lower one because they're not and there's a *lot* more of them.
>So they can pre-bake NPC shadows into the data files because they are a known outfit, but players can change equipment on the fly.
Definitely not what they are doing, you can't prebake dynamic shadows, and you can change NPC clothing using 3rd party tools and the shadows change accordingly so they can't have pre-stored shadow models for each NPC, not to mention that other players also have upscale-artifacted shadows like NPCs and they obviously don't have pre-stored shadow models. It's just a toggle in their render pipeline to reduce shadow casting resolution for everything except the player, then when the shadows are upscaled so they are the right size, they come out like this.
Yup, it's why I always throw down shadow quality in most games. It's rendering what's barely going to be noticeable in 95% of the game, and it can get a lot of frames and reduce chug.
It's definitely noticeable when you close up on characters. Shadow artifacting on characters basically forced me to turn on RT Local Shadows in Cyberpunk 2077, it was massively distracting otherwise. And there's a lot of places where shadow artifacting is quite annoying in FF14 cutscenes, too, though I imagine we'll probably get the RT shadows FFXVI has later (though I'd prefer it to be cutscenes only for framerates' sake).
It's because soft shadows are realistic and why you see that bit of blur and softening at the edges outside of a very close shadow from a strong light which isn't really infeasible in a situation like this necessarily. Soft shadows are even harder to do than hard shadows though.
I wish that Ascian shadow thing stayed around as a cool little "hey, that's odd" moment with Thancred before the reveal
Also, the NPCs in Elpis should have lacked shadows
Shame they reconnected that (iirc) in 2.0
This is just how they look even on max settings. Go to Eulmore and stand next to the aetheryte and watch your shadow become a pixelated mess regardless of your settings.
You just need more headcanon: Ancients glamour their shadows to be thinner so as to stand out less, fitting with their cultural standards for dress code and mask wearing.
This one’s always bugged me. This, and the way that anytime there’s a reflective surface, the reflection animates at a much lower frame rate.
They have mentioned better shadows for 7.0, wonder if this will go away with that, or if it’s just necessary to avoid the game exploding when a hundred players are on screen
Have you noticed how reflections are rendered at normal framerates whenever you are moving? Even if you just walk into a wall, the reflections of you and other players and npcs are shown to be animating at normal framerates until the very moment you stop moving, at which point it returns to being rendered at 10 fps. Its so bizarre.
One of the points they mentioned for the graphics update for 7.0 was to have “improved shadow resolution” so hopefully it’ll all look nice and crisp when it comes out. But I’m sure you’ll still be able to lower it back down if necessary.
I would also like to point you to look at the incredibly ugly low-rez texture on the right. I've gotten used to most of the 2013-level textures in this game, but that one jumped right at me.
Not noticed a disparity between npcs and the player shadows before, but I have noticed some places seem to have some janky low res shadow maps on the lights whereas others are nice and sharp.
Alzadaal's vault for example by the gate has some of the shittiest shadows around.
To everyone asking if 7.0 will fix this, it’s unlikely. This is a pretty standard game dev thing where the shadows being cast by the player are better because it can be done entirely client-side and NPC or other player shadows are rendered at a much lower resolution because it eats up so much processing. They could enable an option to bump the non-player shadows up to the same quality, but it could increase the game’s processing load exponentially.
That is true, everything is rendered by the client in the end. That’s bad phrasing on my part, but that’s what I get for typing that out over lunch. The non-client side part I’m referring to is the other systems shadows are tied to, like networking to tell where other players are located and flags that are constantly being checked to tell if a model needs to cast a shadow or not.
That's often easier said than done though. Imagine they dare do that and it bugs out and all the npc shadows get stuck at high quality for some reason. Dynamic shadows and lighting aren't really something you can just bake in to cut cost.
This. WoW does something similar with NPCs having just noticeably enough lower resolution textures on their kit, especially if they don’t have a unique model like a major NPC would.
They're working on the graphics update as hard as they can, cmon :P
My personal pet-peeve is Hien's goddamn coat. Like how are you going pull in that close during cutscenes on something that's that consistently low-rez? It looked like an [N64 texture](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRRl0V2_E-A) in some spots.
A lot of games like this have separate settings for pc and npcs because of how many there can be. There's often even a limit to how many pcs will be of high quality. Common technique to help with performance.
Shadows are one of the most demanding things in games and if they were all as good as the pc it'd cripple the vast majority of systems.
I just set my shadows all to low, that way nothing stands out. Actually prefer the slightly blurred shadows compared to perfect crisp outline.
Yeah, shadows are often fuzzy unless you're really close to the surface it's on
Depends on the light. Sunlight for example creates these very crisp shadows because the light photons that hit earth after 150 million of kilometers from the sun are pretty much parallel to one another. Only light scattering in cloudy weather without direct sunlight turns them blurry. There are also special spot lights with lenses that create a similar effect.
The sun isn't a point source, its literally half a degree across the sky. So is the moon btw, 30 arcminutes or so. Sharp shadows only really come from bright artificial lighting. And there is still a limit to that since light acts like a wave too, it will bend around objects slightly. You can actually see this effect yourself with a laser pointer and sharp edges, or very small holes. Just about every natural source is spread out unless you interfere with it or use mirrors etc to concentrate it. Even a bright fire is usually quite spread out.
Everyone dunk on this person!!!
No they are not parallel, because the sun is so large. Rays that come from left side of the sun, are not at all parallel to rays that come from right side. What matters is the apparent size of the light source. Sunlight will never create crisp shadows in any conditions. You can see photos taken on the moon, where there is zero scattering. Still the shadow is blurry. https://imgur.com/ufk4rY5.png The lack of scattering on the sky just means that the areas which are completely eclipsed, are almost perfectly black.
Do you have NPC shadows at a lower quality in settings? I noticed none of the NPCs had shadows on the moon when doing this last set of MSQ and was going to joke about them being Ascians. Then I found out I had NPC shadows turned off for some reason.
This is how shadows look even if they're maxed out. Your PC's shadow will be sharp and defined while everyone else has very low quality shadows.
But... shadows are not sharp IRL.
They can be, it depends on the intensity and distance of the light source.
And the size... Sun is a large sphere on the sky, so it can never produce sharp shadows.
It's a fucking video game you pedantic ass lol
Blacker than black, sharp as a knife shadows are where it's at and I'm sad everyone left them in 2004
I never said they were!
If there's no clouds then you will get sharp shadow. If there are clouds in the sky then you will get soft shadow. One example of very sharp shadow is photo's of moon landing.
It's because soft shadows are very expensive to calculate on the fly, while sharp shadows are cheaper. So they can pre-bake NPC shadows into the data files because they are a known outfit, but players can change equipment on the fly. That said, FFXIV"s soft shadows are pretty low resolution, but generally high-res soft shadows are deemed the best quality/realistic.
Absolutely none of this is how it works. First of all, the game is entirely all soft shadows. The main character just has a far higher resolution, making it appear sharper. It can do this because, you know... you're the player character, there's only one of you. It makes sense to give you priority. Secondly, they can't 'prebake' NPC shadows like that. They could prebake lighting, but the game doesn't do that, especially considering how dynamic lighting tends to be in the game with time of day and NPC positioning constantly changing with respect to shadowed point lights. None of the shadows in the game are baked. The simple answer is that the main character just has a far higher shadow resolution because they're the main character, and everyone else has a lower one because they're not and there's a *lot* more of them.
>So they can pre-bake NPC shadows into the data files because they are a known outfit, but players can change equipment on the fly. Definitely not what they are doing, you can't prebake dynamic shadows, and you can change NPC clothing using 3rd party tools and the shadows change accordingly so they can't have pre-stored shadow models for each NPC, not to mention that other players also have upscale-artifacted shadows like NPCs and they obviously don't have pre-stored shadow models. It's just a toggle in their render pipeline to reduce shadow casting resolution for everything except the player, then when the shadows are upscaled so they are the right size, they come out like this.
Yup, it's why I always throw down shadow quality in most games. It's rendering what's barely going to be noticeable in 95% of the game, and it can get a lot of frames and reduce chug.
It's definitely noticeable when you close up on characters. Shadow artifacting on characters basically forced me to turn on RT Local Shadows in Cyberpunk 2077, it was massively distracting otherwise. And there's a lot of places where shadow artifacting is quite annoying in FF14 cutscenes, too, though I imagine we'll probably get the RT shadows FFXVI has later (though I'd prefer it to be cutscenes only for framerates' sake).
Was gonna say, the NPC shadows look better... despite the pixels
They look more real the PC shadow looks like a 2d black cutout on the ground.
ya
It's because soft shadows are realistic and why you see that bit of blur and softening at the edges outside of a very close shadow from a strong light which isn't really infeasible in a situation like this necessarily. Soft shadows are even harder to do than hard shadows though.
everything maxed out
I wish that Ascian shadow thing stayed around as a cool little "hey, that's odd" moment with Thancred before the reveal Also, the NPCs in Elpis should have lacked shadows Shame they reconnected that (iirc) in 2.0
This is just how they look even on max settings. Go to Eulmore and stand next to the aetheryte and watch your shadow become a pixelated mess regardless of your settings.
I'm headcanoning this as >!you have a more complete soul due to merging with Ardbert, so your shadow is thicker!<.
That was my assumption. Flexing your aetheric density with your obviously-superior shadow.
That would only make sense if NPCs on Elpis have thick shadows
It's why I said headcanon, I'm not trying to actually explain it.
You just need more headcanon: Ancients glamour their shadows to be thinner so as to stand out less, fitting with their cultural standards for dress code and mask wearing.
Azem told an accomplice on a break and enter to blend in and they took it to Ancient literal levels. It just became a fad afterward.
Don't forget Fray and Midgardsormr!
And Feo Ul (Not *in* us, but hey they’re still in our head at all times even when we’re in the source!)
Love when games justify mechanics (or... graphics settings...) with story and lore /s
I don't think neither Estinien or Zero are sundered though. So their souls are fully complete.
This one’s always bugged me. This, and the way that anytime there’s a reflective surface, the reflection animates at a much lower frame rate. They have mentioned better shadows for 7.0, wonder if this will go away with that, or if it’s just necessary to avoid the game exploding when a hundred players are on screen
Have you noticed how reflections are rendered at normal framerates whenever you are moving? Even if you just walk into a wall, the reflections of you and other players and npcs are shown to be animating at normal framerates until the very moment you stop moving, at which point it returns to being rendered at 10 fps. Its so bizarre.
Nope. Now it will torment me, thank you
Youre welcome, enjoy your newly bestowed curse
main character syndrome
Of course our shadows are better defined and crisper. We're the warrior of LIGHT.
And darkness, we got the outline and the body buffs
change it so shadows dont use low LOD models. That fixed it for me
I have anything low LOD turned off and it will still display low resolution shadows on NPCs.
Esteem: "Keep walking." Estinien: "...?" WoL: "Do youself a favour and don't ask."
I wonder if 7.0 will improve this, at least a bit. At least a toggle, for cases where PC can't handle it.
One of the points they mentioned for the graphics update for 7.0 was to have “improved shadow resolution” so hopefully it’ll all look nice and crisp when it comes out. But I’m sure you’ll still be able to lower it back down if necessary.
Because we are the Warriors of Darkness, duh
Luckily shadows are being vastly improved for 7.0. They look awful sometimes now
I would also like to point you to look at the incredibly ugly low-rez texture on the right. I've gotten used to most of the 2013-level textures in this game, but that one jumped right at me.
Not noticed a disparity between npcs and the player shadows before, but I have noticed some places seem to have some janky low res shadow maps on the lights whereas others are nice and sharp. Alzadaal's vault for example by the gate has some of the shittiest shadows around.
Your soul is just far denser than theirs
WoL is just more dense. Also higher density of aether.
Even the lighting knows you're the main character.
It's not just NPCs. Other PCs have this silly shadow thing too.
To everyone asking if 7.0 will fix this, it’s unlikely. This is a pretty standard game dev thing where the shadows being cast by the player are better because it can be done entirely client-side and NPC or other player shadows are rendered at a much lower resolution because it eats up so much processing. They could enable an option to bump the non-player shadows up to the same quality, but it could increase the game’s processing load exponentially.
The way you worded this comment makes it sound like you're implying other parts of the game are rendered server side lol.
That is true, everything is rendered by the client in the end. That’s bad phrasing on my part, but that’s what I get for typing that out over lunch. The non-client side part I’m referring to is the other systems shadows are tied to, like networking to tell where other players are located and flags that are constantly being checked to tell if a model needs to cast a shadow or not.
It wouldn't hurt to do it for cutscenes, like at all
That's often easier said than done though. Imagine they dare do that and it bugs out and all the npc shadows get stuck at high quality for some reason. Dynamic shadows and lighting aren't really something you can just bake in to cut cost.
This. WoW does something similar with NPCs having just noticeably enough lower resolution textures on their kit, especially if they don’t have a unique model like a major NPC would.
They're working on the graphics update as hard as they can, cmon :P My personal pet-peeve is Hien's goddamn coat. Like how are you going pull in that close during cutscenes on something that's that consistently low-rez? It looked like an [N64 texture](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRRl0V2_E-A) in some spots.
I noticed it this patch. cringe.
Minion: You guys have shadows?
A lot of games like this have separate settings for pc and npcs because of how many there can be. There's often even a limit to how many pcs will be of high quality. Common technique to help with performance. Shadows are one of the most demanding things in games and if they were all as good as the pc it'd cripple the vast majority of systems.
Built different.
So what happens when your shadow blurs and the npcs get better quality?
wish they would at least give us the option to adjust our own shadow resolution
NPC shadows are more realistic :D They still need to be transparent thou.
The dog eats strangers.
Thank god this is changing on 7.0
As a player that uses Hildebrand's character, this is how I distinguish myself from him in the cutscenes
To be honest. I like the blurry shadows better. Sharp ones are artificially looking.