Constant shadow issues on every single viewer, M4 Mac
tracked
Doll Pudding
Differing shadow issues on every viewer I have tried. Not even sure how to put into words everything going on. Pixelated shadows, shadows only sharp at certain angles, some shadows disappear at other angles. See videos attached for examples.
Viewers where you can fine-tune shadows (like firestorm) seem to have the same issue, sometimes more exaggerated by certain settings. There is no constant though, one issue could happen on a lower setting and also a higher setting- or not at all. It is incredibly random.
Also possibly related is a texture issue- seeing a seam between heads/bodies. I cannot see the seam on my PC, but I see it on my Mac. Other people on PCs and other versions of Mac chips cannot see it.
To recreate:
1.) Be on a Macbook Pro M4, current version Sequoia 15.4.1
2.) Simply cast shadows anywhere and move your camera
Album with a few videos showcasing issue on both LL Viewer and Firestorm: https://imgur.com/a/sl-shadow-issues-j0QtjoQ
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Allegory Malaprop
Some of these problems aren't shadows as much as they are shadow
settings
. I would not have made the same choices as the viewer programmers on a number of the settings (but I'm not going to get into all of that), and you can change many of those defaults in the Debug menu you can get to from the top bar Advanced menu (you may need to make the Advanced menu accessible in Preferences first).Shadows disappearing is part of the Shadow Bias settings (there are 2 in debug, I do not recall what they start with, but "Shadow" and "Bias" are in both of them- Firestorm's much easier to find things in Debug as you can search by any part of the name, not just by first letters). Shadows are set to be...not accurate really by default, and to drop off on close things. This is good because furry layered texture hacks look awful otherwise (there are a few other things that don't work well with shadows that don't skip close stuff)- but it's also bad because you get shadows that skip as a result, even (way!) beyond the tolerance. If you set both the Shadow Bias settings to 0, you'll get much less of the shadows being skipped- but you can also tweak them to closer to 0 but not quite 0 and find that shadows are working better for you without things also looking so dirty.
The pixelated issue can also be tweaked (though still not entirely consistently eliminated) with other shadow settings in Debug- the downside to most of them being degraded performance (which may or may not be apparent on your system).
Also be aware that altitude matters on MANY things in SL- settings that work on the ground may not be as good in a skybox above 1000m, due to multiple issues.
Each viewer keeps Debug settings stored separately, so you will need to tweak values in every viewer you use.
Atlas Linden
tracked
Atlas Linden
Thanks for your report, Doll Pudding!
This has been expected behaviour for some time now but there is definitely room for improving these shadows. This issue is now tracked here in GitHub to investigate this further: https://github.com/secondlife/viewer/issues/4258