Penumbra to Amnesia shadow rendering regression

[Bucic]

In relation to the Lantern dynamic shadows MOD for Amnesia - Download / Screenshots
Out of genuine curiosity - what has happened? Penumbra had dynamic, smooth* shadows either from a glowstick or from a flashlight, with little FPS hit. In Amnesia they are disabled altogether. When enabled by changing the lantern light from point to spot type light the shadows are jagged and cause big FPS drop.

What was the technical rationale** for this? If the decission has been made to sacrifice shadows for X, can it be reversed so X is sacrificed for better shadows?

*not to be confused with soft shadows
**in Amnesia you have a lantern while in Penumbra you had a flashlight is NOT a technical rationale

[Argoon]

Afaik that is not possible, the Penumbra engine add full stencil shadow support so all objects casted shadows if you wanted, they are very high quality but have some hard limitations, for example making them soft is very hard and expensive, and they don't support alpha mapped textures, Amnesia engine on the other end doesn't support stencil shadows, but supports a more modern technique called shadow maps, they are texture based so the shadow resolution option has the bigger impact on their quality (if they look very blocky then you need to increase the shadow resolution, not the screen resolution ) shadow maps are better than stencil shadows because you can make them soft very easily and they also support alpha mapped objects, unfortunately on Amnesia only the spot light can cast them.

[Bucic]

What we've essentially got is:
Penumbra / 30 FPS / good looking dynamic shadows
Amnesia / 15 FPS / bad looking dynamic shadows*
so me, being a simple peasant from Central Europe, no see any benefits.

In fact I would very much like to know if it's possible to make shadows in Amnesia more like in penumbra. Is it?

*
Only through a MOD; no dynamic shadows at all in the stock version of the game.

[Traggey]

As described above, the engines work differently, Amnesias engine is built to cast better and smoother shadows, creating a better look in general, no, you can not change it to work the way it does in penumbra, different engine.

The penumbra shadows were abandoned to make way for better rendering in general, also as already mentioned the penumbra shadows atually were VERY limited, amnesia uses many different modeling/texturing techniques that simply would not blend well with the the rendering methods of penumbra.

If you want to even get close to changing the shadow casting around you're going to need the engines base code and remake alot of stuff, which would be very hard work and is currently impossible due to the lack of source code.

[Bucic]

This was a really bad call, IMO. Penumbra dynamic shadows simply look better and that's that. In Amnesia dynamic elements of scenes have been sacrificed for static ones. I've just watched AAMFP trailer and it seems it will share the issue. Too bad Frictionalgames took the direction of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myst


Can the Amnesia shadows resolution at least be increased somehow over the maximum available in the options? The config files seem to contain shadow quality parameter of "2". Changing it to a higher value either has no effect or causes colourful flickering.

[Argoon]

I don't know how to increase the shadow resolution sorry i'm not a HPL2 modder,

But know this, stencil shadows also known as volumetric shadows are being replaced on all game engines by shadow map techniques, why, because they are just better, for example it would be impossible to have a good looking forest with dynamic shadows using stencil shadows, for the simple reason that instead of seeing the leafs being casted on the ground you would see the invisible plane (a square) where the branch or leaf texture is applied being casted instead, that is true for any object with alpha transparency, on the other end shadow maps don't have that limitation because they don't use the objects true geometry to simulate shadows.

About why frictional games only made spot lights able to cast shadows and they used them very little on the game.

Imo the first reason was the inclusion of SSAO (Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion ), if you look carefully to a object with SSAO on you will see it almost looks like it is casting a small shadow, so it looks like the object is really grounded (what only shadows could do before), and because SSAO is a relatively heavy effect if they were using shadows galore then the game would suffer badly from performance reasons on low end laptos and PC's, that was imo the other reason, the need for the game to run on a large amount of PC's.

[Bucic]

Thank you all for tour responses! Rep inbound.

FG went for shadowing tech upgrade:
That's cool but show me a game that upgraded its dynamic shadowing from active stencil to active nothing. One have to admit that it's hell of a sacrifice.

Increasing shadows resolution:
Does anyone know how to increase it past the "2"? I'd like to test, what happens if you increase it with ssao disabled.

[Patrik]

I believe some settings are at their max at 0 or 1, and that increasing the number decreases the quality. You could try that.

[Bucic]

I believe some settings are at their max at 0 or 1, and that increasing the number decreases the quality. You could try that.

That's strange The default is 2.

[Bonehead]

From what I've seen, AAMFP will have dynamic shadows. Shown in the first trailer where the pig is tearing the door apart, you can see his shadow clearly moving along with the light source. Also showing as the door is being chipped away. I'm hoping dynamic shadows will be used heavily in AAMFP... I believe that it adds to the atmosphere exponentially.