Version 0.291 16/03/2024
Optimized for performance. Medium shadows setting already gives better quality shadows than vanilla high so this should be good for almost anyone. If you set it high that's a setting never existed in DCS but can be hard on your system (but looks phenomenal).
You need to set SSS on to be able to use it. Otherwise you will not get distant shadows.
This mod breaks integrity check. Turn off secondary shadows (I did not test it with it). Link is compatible with mod managers.
TL, DR: This mod breaks integrity check. Turn off secondary shadows (I did not test it with it). Link is compatible with mod managers.
Version 0.29 31/10/2021
Fr om v.0.29 and dcs 2.9 this mod works complimentary with Screen Space Shadows (SSS) so you need to turn it on.
Cascaded shadows are active in the cockpit and in the surroundings until 300 meters wh ere sceen space shadows take it over from there.
I use 3 cascades instead of 5 in original state. Cascaded shadows range reduced from 7000m to 300. All 3 ingame shadow preset profiles are edited.
Most people should not have problems running medium and actually high settings too. I have provided low settings also. The quality of low settings is already better than vanilla medium. High setting is godlike. Especially helicopter pilots will love the high setting, medium would do that too. I really like this one personally. I hope you enjoy it too.
Info:24/10/2021
After 2.9 I'm reconsidering to change it completely to work together with SSS. It was a surprise. When ED fixes the SSS bug (shadow acne and unstable shadows) I'll be back to business. I'll uitilize SSS and make them work combined together with shadow cascades. It will allow us to give more resources on the cockpit and near shadows.
Version 0.1_ 28/08/2023
Updated and enabled LOW MEDIUM and HIGH shadow settings.
Try first the LOW setting. It should give better quality than vanilla High already and should not hit your system any harder than Medium.
I did not test flat shadows.
Initial release------
Hi,
I was fed up with nervous shimmering flickering and changing shadows in VR so made my first attempt to make it better. This mod is especially aimed for helicopter pilots. Or VR guys with rather powerful gpu.
What I did:
1- Disabled flat shadows completely (less cpu usage) yay! no more shimmering at distance
2- Reduced shadow distances from 7km to 2km (I was not big fan of that huge long distance shadows. Never seen any other sim calculating object shadows 7km away anyway) yay for me but I don't know what you think
3-Reduced shadow cascades from 5 to 2. Now we have cockpit shadows as one bitmap and rest as the second shadow map. Current cascade system did not bring much efficiency but it actually made horrible passages from various types especially in VR (which was really irritating).
4- Increased shadow bitmap from 4K to 16K. considering I reduced the cascades from 5 to 2 this new 2 cascade system requires almost double the vram. Booooooooo!. It asks around 0.5GB more. so be aware. But it gives you so much quality in the cockpit you will not believe. Hornet even looks wonderful when shadows fall on the screens.
5- The only visible border you will notice in game is the ring of objects (especially trees start receiving shadows) If anyone knows how to make that transient smoother please have a look at shadow shader in game files. (I did not touch that). It has some procedures to smooth the cascades but I could not find anything about what I mentioned here)
6-This mod breaks integrity check. But may be it will be fine with ECW
7- You can turn off terrain shadows if you want and you will have very high quality cockpit shadows.
I'm planning to edit other profiles make it more useful for people with weak systems in the future. Current setting would be really overkill for people who are flying on pancake with 1080p or even 1440p. Effect of this mod is really visible mostly in VR and then in 4K.
PS: It looks like a basic solution but I spent a week on it trying many combinations. Each time you change a value you need to restart the game......
