What made dynamic shadows start to suck?

[wyrdwad]

One of my long-standing pet peeves in video games has always been lighting and shadows -- I hate seeing a game feature circle shadows underneath its characters, far preferring to see games use human-shaped shadows or (better still) dynamic shadows instead.

The problem is, dynamic shadows... ain't what they used to be. Has anyone else noticed this?

Look at the dynamic shadows in early 2000s games (on PS2 hardware, in two cases!) like Dark Cloud, Gurumin (PC version) and Okage: Shadow King:


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Even Zwei II, released by Falcom in 2008 on PC, had really clean dynamic shadows... apparently (when I played it, they looked all jagged, but they look pretty much perfect in these screenshots, so... I had a bad graphics card, I guess?):



Now look at the dynamic shadows in Ys: Memories of Celceta (GREAT GAME YOU SHOULD BUY IT, SHADOWS OR NO SHADOWS, SHAMELESS PLUG) and Senran Kagura: Shinovi Versus (OH HEY I HEAR THE SENRAN KAGURA GAMES ARE AWESOME TOO, YOU SHOULD TOTALLY BUY THE 3DS ONE, SHAMELESS PLUG!), both games that were developed within the last two years:




...My question is... what happened? How have we regressed this much in dynamic shadow technology? How can games running on the PS2 have such smooth, beautiful shadows, while games running on modern systems have such rough, jagged, inconsistent shadows? Have people simply stopped caring what shadows look like in games? Has graphics technology made it more difficult to create on-the-fly shadows for all on-screen objects? Are we just... out of graphic memory?

I'm not trying to be cynical here, but seriously looking for answers, as the games I've listed are far from the only offenders, and are only being called out by name because they're games I know and love -- they're my familiars. But I seem to recall virtually every game that featured dynamic shadows in the early 2000s having really smooth, beautiful ones, and virtually every game that featured dynamic shadows in the late 2000s to the present day having really jagged, distracting-looking ones, and I'm really curious why this is. Anyone with knowledge of graphics hardware or software care to weigh in?

-Tom

[Colonel Kurtz]

I own a sizeable number of VITA games, and it's particularly prevalent on VITA (perfect example is Unit 13, demo available on PSN.)
This question is such a rich subject, it's almost Unreal. Joking apart it was a hard to avoid plague of the current generation. It deserves to be explored. Welcome to a world of particle effects and specular lightning. We're gonna talk a lot about lightning and RAM, I reckon it's going to be a meaty thread. A necessary thread. I second the "What happened" position, even though like everyone I have some technical suppositions. Enough with those dark stair-like shadows I create on the walls.


What happened, FOOLS?



... And if they dropped off... WAS THE SHADOW ROUND?

[thoothan]

Those tits are bigger than her head and they certainly aren't properly represented in her jaggy shadow smdh

[kal]

I think the answer is more onscreen characters combined with real-time shadows on background objects. The processing power is being distributed across a wider degree of features. Also the other answer is of course the fact that the current gen of consoles have really been milked for all they can be graphically and I guess sharp shadows weren't on the top of the list. Perhaps with the next gen we'll see a return to hard line shadows.

[Colonel Kurtz]

Bump: Doom 3 on the XBOX was one of the very, very few games which displayed those super low-res shadows. It is also the game with the most taxing lightning engine on that machine. Mmmmh....

[bakudon]

It’s gotta be something in connection to modern lightning technology. It’s annoyin how the shadows nowadays often have weird, shifting and blurry edges, even though the things that cast them stay immobile.

[dial033]

hmm, here`s the explanation a 3d-programmer gave me: earlier games used stencil shadows which were effectively an extra mesh on the scene that was somehow "flattened" to a plane in order to display the shadows. This means that your 3d-artist needs to create one increasing overall costs. Games nowadays use shadow maps which are more or less textures which are being projected by the light source on the scene. The advantage is that those textures can be filtered, the drawback is that they can use up at lot more memory than stencils the bigger they become. Since memory is often an issue on consoles they seem to prefer primitive shadow maps which may subjectively look worse than shadows on older titles.

[coaxial]

I think the circular shadows aren't so bad if there are a lot of platforming elements like Soul Reaver. It is kind of sad that games like Smackdown 2 can have better shadows than something modern. Faux blurry mirror surfaces are equally annoying.

[Ike]

Shadows for some reason eat up a lot of calculating power, and the more complex the models get the more power they have to eat up. Shadows are only really gameplay-necessary in platformers anyway.

[Super Orbus]

If you want actual dynamic shadows you have to calculate occlusion for every object in the scene from every light source for every frame. Even assuming you cheat some, or only do shadows for character models or whatever, that's a significant amount of extra processing.

[caoslayer]

- Character polygon count
- Characters in screen
- Lighting effects
- AI and physics calculations
- Framerate
- Detailed Shadows
- Textures quality

Pick the two least importants thing to sacrifice.

Sadly for most developers, framerate is the second one since neither screenshots, youtube videos nor TV ads runs at 60Hz and the vast majority people don't seem to care if a game runs at 30 or 60.

[Snarboo]

As dial033 noted, the difference is between stencil (a copy of the model projected onto a surface) versus realtime (shadows cast by the lighting engine). The latter is far more taxing, but stencil shadows are old as dirt and also dirt cheap in comparison. I mean, some versions of GLQuake even had support for stencil shadows! Most PS2 games that made use of them probably had "baked in" lighting, which is why they used stencils in the first place.

I find the first example taken from Dark Cloud interesting though because the shadow doesn't seem to match the light source, making it look stranger in comparison to your other examples even if the shadow is higher quality.

[wyrdwad]

Yeah, I guess in that dungeon, it kinda does look a bit strange. But in towns, the shadow engine in Dark Cloud is actually really impressive, as the game has a day/night cycle, so you can actually watch the shadows stretch across the ground as the sun sets, then slink away from the other direction as the sun rises the next morning. For the time, it blew me away -- and it looked absolutely perfect, too. No jaggies or anything.

-Tom

[Deleted]

I actually find the dynamic shadows in Streets of Rage Remake to be incredibly distracting. It was probably a lot easier to make flat models with sprite textures than to make a true 2D game, but did it really need real time shadows?

[fullspectrumwarrior]

I've been noticing this for years also. Shadows have looked poor in games since early in the 360's life.

When shadows were stencil shadows they looked much better. PS2, Xbox & Gamecube saw a huge jump over the PS1 gen with real stencil shadows. Afterwards they just became jagged & ugly or in the case of really new games like Crysis 3 our shadoe was a bunch of round blobs put together to look like a shadow.

This is just one of many things that have regressed over the years along with gameplay, features & options in games. It's like they thought we wouldn't notice the intentional de-evolution of gaming.