Observe other games with dynamic shadows and a day-night cycle like Gothic 4, Two Worlds and Assassins Creed 2 and you quickly notice a glaring problem - shadows jump in a very noticeable and ugly way and it's all down to how short the days and nights are. Farcry 2 doesn't have this problem as the day-night cycle is much longer so shadow advancement is much slower - and looks infinitely better. Since Beth always seems to go for a short day-night cycle consolers are going to be stuck with the ugly shadow jumping, pc players will quickly have mods to slow time down or change it via the console.

Just a thought, people.

You can compare the new Skyrim dynamic shadows and time cycle with other games, but thing is, I think if it didn't work well, it wouldn't have been implemented.

How long was the Oblivion day/night cycle compared to Farcrys? Because i feelt like they were rather close.

Wait what are you complaining about? How do dynamic shadows look ugly? Or the speed of a time cycle ruin a game? Can you answer that for me? No? Well good day to you sir and stop judging a game that only has had one gameplay trailer so far and hasn't been released yet.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNmtbFM3h3c

i wish people would stop using this line against people who haven't mentioned a SINGLE [censored] THING RELATED TO THE TRAILER.

OP: i get where you're coming from and i can see how it could be a little jarring, but there's only so much they can do to resolve that. making the timescale slower than the 30:1 they've had going since Morrowind would very likely mess up the AI packages - turning it down to even 15 in Oblivion and Fallout 3 would result in NPCs eating the same potato or whatever for much, much longer than normal.

honestly i'm glad shadows are even in in the first place - i can get over the weird shadow rush that comes with time compression.

ed what's the timescale in stuff like Assassin's Creed anyway? i know in RDR and STALKER it's somewhere around 10:1 and the lighting is a lot more impressive since it takes that much longer for a day to pass in-game.

Sigh, I will explain this in more detail. When you have dynamic shadows then things like building and trees all cast shadows. The game simulates the passage of time by having the sun move in the sky and by having the shadows cast by objects move in an appopriate way. Unfortunately the video Slightly Rotated linked to doesn't illustrate the problem in that game - when you look up close at the cast shadows they don't move smoothly they jump by what would be several inches in the game world every few seconds. It looks pretty clunky and spoils immersion. It's even more pronounced in Gothic 4.

Don't get me wrong, I love dynamic shadows - they give real depth to the world. But they have to move smoothly.

Dark Deliverians: I hope you're right, but those other games I mentioned didn't.

kamino: perhaps you're right, although days did seem a lot longer in Farcry 2

Or they could put a cap on how "tall" the shadows can get? Sure, it wouldn't be accurate then, but it wouldn't be very noticable. That might also slow the shadows change, because its range is shortened and the time isn't.

I remember day length in Farcry 2 to be similar to Oblivion.

Man, I gotta get that game out and play it again.

In Oblivion the default timescale is 30 (30x faster, 48 minutes = 24 game hours), In Far Cry 2, the timescale is 4 (4x faster, 6 hours = 24 game hours). So Oblivion is 7.5 times as fast as Far Cry 2. (Source is an interview about Far Cry 2 with one of the developers and the construction set for Oblivion)

Personally, I would like to see a timescale of about 10, so it would take 2.4 hours for a full day. You can still wait right?

I really hope they can get a good balance with timescale and ai, might be a couch. Of course Farcry 2 doesn't have to deal with complicated ai. Must be a personal thing, noticeably jerky shadows really get on my nerves.

Bored Virulence: be a shame to have to do that, lengthening shadows are great!

Anyway, 'night all, it's late and bed is beckoning.

I know it's a pretty specific case, but having just gone through Glarthir's questline in my current Oblivion playthrough ("follow her around for a day, see what she does" "ok, now follow him around all day, and see what he does" "ok, now follow him around all day and see what he does" :banghead: ).....

...slowing down the timescale that much sounds kinda painful.

I've played Assassin's Creed, 2, and Brotherhood, but the shadows have never been a noticeable problem for me. I guess I suppose you can see them moving if you stop and stare, but that's really not a scenario that happens often in those games. I noticed this mostly in the original Fable actually, which had shadows that moved very fast. There was specifically a statue that rotated based on the time, and to get into a certain place you had to wait for it to point at it, and while staring at this statue, the shadows just move so fast. IIRC, Oblivion's day/night last much longer than they do in Fable.

Another factor to consider is the height of objects though. The taller the object, the longer the shadow it casts. The longer the shadow, the more noticeable it is when it moves. Speed at the end of a rotating circle is faster than the center.

oh wow, for real? that sounds awful. i've never seen that happen in any game i've ever played with global dynamic shadows.

it probably all boils down to the lighting methods used. hopefully Skyrim will use one of the ones that don't svck.

Wow... i knew AC2 had dynamic shadows, as per the intro world loading bits, but I didn't know they had full day cycles. I never was in an area for too long.

I got shadows in Morrowind (using mods) and I could easily see shadows moving. I had to turn the timescale to 1/3 of what is usually is, that looks okay...

I think differently. Based on empiric proof these last few years....

I guess you would notice if you stood in the same spot for about an hour

Sounds to me as if the problem isn't simply the compressed time, as such, but that they only recalculate the shadows every few seconds - for large static objects at any rate. Presumably they recalculate the shadows every frame for NPCs and movable objects.

Whether Skyrim has the same problem will really depend on how far they've been able to optimise dynamic shadows, and so how often they can afford to recalculate them. If they give the shadows soft enough edges it might go some way to disguising any jumps.

Actually I'm guess the problem you're referring to is a lightmap issue, not a dynamic shadow issue. Dynamic shadows always have smooth transition because the shadows are processed real-time and thus don't jump in any way with a changing lightsource.

Dynamic shadows are extremely heavy on your GPU though, so most games use a mix of dynamic shadows (for actors and such) and lightmaps (for static parts). Lightmapped terrain looks really good but has one serious issue. It cannot react to a dynamic lightsource (like a day and nightcycle) because the shadows are baked into the terrain. A lot of games use several lightmaps for different times of day. Which means there are like 24 lightmaps (just an example) that are dynamically loaded based on the time of day. When this happens, you see a jump in the shadows as it unloads one and loads another lightmap.

It's quite a problem, because I think dynamic shadows on terrain are not an option. Due to the shear size of the terrain, it will fry any current GPU.

From what I know, implementing dynamic shadows in the wrong way is extremely heavy on the GPU. Good example is Oblivion's shadows. Horribly implemented.

A dynamic shadows mod was added to Morrowind's MGE. I asked a guy the performance hit, he said practically none. Also, A LOT (more like... 90%) of all recent games have had dynamic shadows. It has existed for quite a few years now.
I believe the issue is therefore how the code is written and not as much as the dynamic shadows themselves.