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FOV and shadow detail.


jezamarie

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So I was screwing around in Whiterun, and sometimes my FOV resets itself to some ridiculously low setting. I imagine I have a mod conflict somewhere. It's not frequent enough to bother me and a ~FOV 80 fixes it in like 2 seconds. Anyways, I digress. I noticed something thanks to the mod I have that adds trees to Whiterun. I was busy staring at the ground when a FOV reset happened and lo and behold the shadows were way more detailed. I am running shadows at completely default Ultra settings, without any ini tweaks. The only shadow mod I have is a shadow striping fix. Here's a couple screens. It is much more apparent in game watching the shadows of the trees flutter. But I think you can tell pretty well with these two screens. I haven't heard anything before that relates shadow detail to FOV, only the map resolution and viewing distance. So maybe the fact that it's tied to FOV might help someone, somewhere with real modding ability to perhaps detangle the web of crap shadows this game has.

 

First, FOV 80.

 

And then, FOV 45

 

So, does anyone know anything about this? With what little knowledge I have concerning how Skyrim handles shadows, this can't be because of a mod or ini tweaks anyways, it has to be the engine itself. It also just seems so odd that shadows are affected by FOV. Changing your FOV doesn't affect viewing distance or shadow map resolution so it must have a completely unique affect on them. I dunno, just food for thought maybe.

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What the? I'm gonna try this and see if I get similar results. As much as it pains me to use the default FOV, it pains me more to see the disgusting blocky shadows.

 

Hopefully Bethesda understands that modifying an old engine isn't the answer for TES: VI.

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I wonder if there's a way to trick the engine into thinking it's at a low fov, even if it's at like 80 or 90...

I don't know if that's even vaguely possible, but it would be great if it was plausible.

Edited by Rennn
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There's an ini. tweek for FOV "fdefaultfov=XX" so it could possibly be the engine resetting an in game console FOV tweek back to default every so often, because of no change in the ini. I don't know for sure though, but the ini. is worth a try...

 

PS: the ini. tweek should go in the [General] section.

Edited by fms1
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  • 3 weeks later...

What the? I'm gonna try this and see if I get similar results. As much as it pains me to use the default FOV, it pains me more to see the disgusting blocky shadows.

 

Hopefully Bethesda understands that modifying an old engine isn't the answer for TES: VI.

 

Did you ever try it and see? And I agree with you on the engine issue. But let's face it, this "new" engine was designed solely to fit on aging console systems, which is a direct deviation from their previous MO of building the baddest rpg's on the planet. Makes me sad really :(

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I wonder if there's a way to trick the engine into thinking it's at a low fov, even if it's at like 80 or 90...

I don't know if that's even vaguely possible, but it would be great if it was plausible.

 

Hmm, I wonder too. I hadn't even considered that. That would be awesome. It just seems odd to me that the shadows can spontaneously become more detailed by altering the FOV without affecting the FPS at all. That just goes to show that the way in which shadows were handled in the engine is very poorly implemented. I wish I knew how to script or code in an effort to remedy this, but alas, I know nothing of the two. I was hoping somebody from the mod community would catch this post and hopefully look into it but maybe they didn't because there's no way to alter it.

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What the? I'm gonna try this and see if I get similar results. As much as it pains me to use the default FOV, it pains me more to see the disgusting blocky shadows.

 

Hopefully Bethesda understands that modifying an old engine isn't the answer for TES: VI.

 

Did you ever try it and see? And I agree with you on the engine issue. But let's face it, this "new" engine was designed solely to fit on aging console systems, which is a direct deviation from their previous MO of building the baddest rpg's on the planet. Makes me sad really :(

 

I had minimal results at best. Not much of a difference to notice an overall improvement, without actually inspecting the shadows anyway.

 

I hope Bethesda attempts to address this issue in upcoming patches. They just added new shadows for grass in 1.5.

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