Sup guys. So I am curious if this mod could remedy the flickering shadows with ORC193 (using both mods together)... And if so, would it be a thousand steps and difficult to implement
semi-necro, btu still... i'd advice agaisnt using self shadows. not because of performance or anything, but because they glitch out really easily, especially with faces.
I used to use this with an older version of OR, that gave me MUCH better performance (as far as impact from the shadows themselves), MUCH fewer visual issues and MUCH nicer shadows than anything I can come up with by tweaking current OR/using others OR shadows tweaks, is there any way to use this on top of OR's shaders without OR's shadow engine?
god wish i had my old screenshots folder, i would have posted some examples that are absolutely impossible with existing OR, and if they were my laptop would probably cause runaway greenhouse effect and end life on earth if i tried it, where as it previously had barely an impact on FPS.
for reference, the old OR+SME set up was on a GTX 980M w/ a 6700k CPU, current pure OR setup is with a 3060 w/ a 5900x (almost 4x the price and 6+ years newer)
while OR is certainly king of shader mods for tesIV in my book, most of its other functions including the shadows leave a lot to be desired
I'd edit this down to just "still a great mod" but maybe others could use the context and "howevers"
yep just disabling OR's shadows in data>shaders>shadows for all cell types then installing this on top of it seems a pretty clean & simple replacement, some things that to be fair OR did do better was the streaming as well as the far & lod shading. 2 issues however, 1: OR's terrain shader will break SME's far shadows as well as tree canopy shadows, and had to be turned off (there are nice lod noise mods and the like to get a "comparable" result with anyway) 2: OR will set your vanilla shadow count to 0 automatically when the game loads, so you need to set the *max* shadows (iActorShadowIntMax and iActorShadowExtMax respectively) to a high number in the oblivion ini (as opposed to just the usual shadow count that the shademe readme tells you to alter, max count is slightly below that) so that you can set the shadows slider back to the full 100/whatever high number you used, otherwise the setting you'd have access to in game would still max out at the default 10.
problem area i checked (the beards shop from FOMO east docks that seemed to be trying to render shadows from every damn bristle on the multiple brush items in the shop) after making the recommended oblivion ini changes went from <10 fps while still to 26 also while still (still a particularly bad place to have shadows on at all in while moving around but certainly not this mods fault). While in VERY busy interiors SME performed better, in more vanilla areas, interior & exterior, tweaking SME up to try and match OR's shadow coverage did reduce FPS & cause more stutter overall, whether this is just how it is or there's still some background loading of OR's shadows compounding with SME's shadows I don't know. Ultimately I've swapped back to OR's shadows and accepted turning them off on busy modded areas, and in general not using mods that replace wide base game areas where it's rendering becomes a problem (UL, Better cities, better dungeons/snu's dungeons, etc). The thought of turning off OR's interior shadows and setting exterior shadow count to 0 to still allow OR exclusively for exteriors but SME exclusively for interiors did cross my mind but ill leave that for another time.
on the shadows taking a while to fade in (or conversely the fade in being too noticeable if you're running a lower number of total shadows), fShadowFadeTime in oblivion.ini can be reduced or increased (value is in seconds, default is 1.000)
145 comments
Anybody know why the SelfShadows is not appear (even I already set bActorSelfShadowing = 1 in Oblivion.ini)?
god wish i had my old screenshots folder, i would have posted some examples that are absolutely impossible with existing OR, and if they were my laptop would probably cause runaway greenhouse effect and end life on earth if i tried it, where as it previously had barely an impact on FPS.
for reference, the old OR+SME set up was on a GTX 980M w/ a 6700k CPU, current pure OR setup is with a 3060 w/ a 5900x (almost 4x the price and 6+ years newer)
while OR is certainly king of shader mods for tesIV in my book, most of its other functions including the shadows leave a lot to be desired
yep just disabling OR's shadows in data>shaders>shadows for all cell types then installing this on top of it seems a pretty clean & simple replacement, some things that to be fair OR did do better was the streaming as well as the far & lod shading. 2 issues however,
1: OR's terrain shader will break SME's far shadows as well as tree canopy shadows, and had to be turned off (there are nice lod noise mods and the like to get a "comparable" result with anyway)
2: OR will set your vanilla shadow count to 0 automatically when the game loads, so you need to set the *max* shadows (iActorShadowIntMax and iActorShadowExtMax respectively) to a high number in the oblivion ini (as opposed to just the usual shadow count that the shademe readme tells you to alter, max count is slightly below that) so that you can set the shadows slider back to the full 100/whatever high number you used, otherwise the setting you'd have access to in game would still max out at the default 10.
problem area i checked (the beards shop from FOMO east docks that seemed to be trying to render shadows from every damn bristle on the multiple brush items in the shop) after making the recommended oblivion ini changes went from <10 fps while still to 26 also while still (still a particularly bad place to have shadows on at all in while moving around but certainly not this mods fault). While in VERY busy interiors SME performed better, in more vanilla areas, interior & exterior, tweaking SME up to try and match OR's shadow coverage did reduce FPS & cause more stutter overall, whether this is just how it is or there's still some background loading of OR's shadows compounding with SME's shadows I don't know.
Ultimately I've swapped back to OR's shadows and accepted turning them off on busy modded areas, and in general not using mods that replace wide base game areas where it's rendering becomes a problem (UL, Better cities, better dungeons/snu's dungeons, etc). The thought of turning off OR's interior shadows and setting exterior shadow count to 0 to still allow OR exclusively for exteriors but SME exclusively for interiors did cross my mind but ill leave that for another time.
on the shadows taking a while to fade in (or conversely the fade in being too noticeable if you're running a lower number of total shadows), fShadowFadeTime in oblivion.ini can be reduced or increased (value is in seconds, default is 1.000)
Is there a way to have exterior shadow part of this plugin disabled so only interior shadows are coming from this plugin?
Is this... heavy? smile. My notebook: Intel Core i3-6006U, Intel HD Graphics 520 and only 4GB Memory. What do you think?
Peace.
I mean, when in possession of a Citroën 2PK you don't ask if you can win the 24Hrs of Le Mans with it...
I'm really looking forward to this - this laptop is really weak!
But it will take "some" time... eventually, hehe...