WA56 tall grass shadows

[ilya1502]

Not really an issue or bug report, so I decided not to place this into the Support Forum.

First of all, I would like to thank the team for the great WA56 airport add-on: I had never experienced such an immersion feeling with any scenery before!

The scenery is really all the way good except some minor thing. When I turn on all the grass, it produces very weird and ugly shadows all around (the right part of the screenshot below - I've made one shot of two, the shadows clutter all the airstrip), while it all looks absolutely beautiful with the ground scenery shadows turned off (the left part). Personally, I don't like to turn off ground scenery shadows, but this grass looks definitely better without them.

Is it possible to turn off the grass shadows for that strip only or, perhaps, it may be possible to make a small patch that removes the shadows?

Anyway, thank you for all the minutes and hours of joy this scenery gives!

[John Venema]

We always recommend that ground scenery shadows are turned off, in all our user guides for the following reasons:

1. All our sceneries have all ground shadows already burnt onto the ground

2. Ground shadows incur a BIG performance hit, just like aircraft shadows

3. There are square shadow bugs with some of the default autogen trees since SP2

[ilya1502]

1. All our sceneries have all ground shadows already burnt onto the ground

Thank you for the reply, John. But I suppose that burnt shadows don't move with the sun, do they?

[John Venema]

1. All our sceneries have all ground shadows already burnt onto the ground

Thank you for the reply, John. But I suppose that burnt shadows don't move with the sun, do they?

It's those constant shadow position calculations (by the CPU, not GPU)  required for every single object in frame that makes ground shadows such a no-no. To me, not offloading that as a DX9 API call is one of the fundamental design flaws of the FSX engine.

I would much rather take the smoother performance with burnt in shadows versus FSX's much-too-sharp, non occluded, CPU-sucking shadows. 

[Bill Womack]

Not to mention the fact that the shadows are flat planes that don't conform to the ground beneath them. Any reality they lend by changing throughout the day is killed by that flatness, IMO. I used to be a "shadows-on" kind of guy, always. These days, I hardly bother. The burned-in Orbx shadows are enough for me.