I don't know if anyone else has this problem, but I do at least.
If I change the Shadow Quality from the Video options to anything higher than Low, the shadows cast by my character aren't visible but shadows made by other players are. This seems to happen only when I am using model edits. Currently I'm using Ry's and I haven't tested if this occurs on any others.
Does anyone else have this bug, and is there a known solution to it? The shadows appeared just fine before the patch 4.0.1.
Edit: While mounted, my mount's shadow shows but not my character's. _________________ "I do what I want! You have a problem?"
Can you guys say what video card you have with the shadow problems? I doubt it but maybe its an ATI or Nvidia problem. Also, what operating system? For example I run XP and I know XP only supports up to DirectX 9. Not because of any problem with XP but because MS wants people to upgrade.
Might be a something to do with the Model and somthings with the games shadow could have changed from 3.3 and 4.0 (there might have ben an extra added)
Only trouble i have with shadows is that the highest settings hammer my FPS down to a less then a quard changing other settings was barely notice able (aside the quality loss...) _________________
I use GTX460 and run ultra with shadows on and always above 25 fps on 25 man raids. But to the original concern of this topic. You do not see your own shadow because your model is old. Other models with the same edit, such as NPCs or other players will also produce no shadow. An un-modified character or a modified character with an up-to-date model will still have shadows. This problem has been reported and solved in other threads.
SoulTrain0217 wrote: Blizz did update the way shadows work in 4.0.1 - it's another graphics change along with sunrays and water reflections.Those two is awesome (even more when it rains in the water!) however can't say the same for the maximum settings for shadows. it's unrealistic by how much FPS it eats (asumming that is a big error) the game is not playable with it on... due to the ~75% FPS loss by that setting alone (and it's not much better with minimum, view distance or Multisampling) _________________
I would think this is because the shadows are probably prebaked "projected" animations that go along with your character (rather than rendered on the fly like most 3D gaming engines). The mods don't (yet) include them... so you don't see them.
Zilem wrote: it's unrealistic by how much FPS it eats (asumming that is a big error) the game is not playable with it on... due to the ~75% FPS loss by that setting alone (and it's not much better with minimum, view distance or Multisampling)Yeah, I can set everything on ultra except for shadows and it'll run as smooth as can be. Turn on Ultra shadows, the fps goes from 60 fps (with vertical sync) to about 15fps, with shadows on Good they're roughly 34fps. But in games that use dynamic shadows (via DirectX 10/11) like Resident Evil 5, LOTRO, Bioshock 2, and others, highest detail shadows don't have nearly the same impact on fps. So it's my conclusion/suspicion that the reason why the shadows eat so much fps in WoW is that they're not properly implemented via DirectX 10/11 api, perhaps it's rendering via some DirectX 9.0c pipeline, or some home-brewed dynamic shadow rendering solution that Blizzard came up with. It just seems like it's not making use of capabilities of DirectX 10 or 11 capable cards. Although.. there is a way to change the graphics API that the game engine renders with. pre 4.0.0 the only options were d3d9 or opengl and in 3.3.3 they added GLL (macs only). This setting is changed by adding the following line to your Config.wtf in your World of Warcraft\WTF folder
I just noticed it says d3d11 "only works with Vista (Service Pack 2 and KB971512[1] required)/Windows 7, alongside DirectX 10/DirectX 11 graphics cards" so I'll give it a try and see if it in anyway affects the graphics (mainly shadow) performance. (or makes my game crash, as it being experimental)
Edit: Using d3d11 did not seem to make the shadows hurt the fps any less, but it did seem to make my game disconnect a lot more frequently (shortly after logging in (Dalaran)).
Shadows seem to be the only thing that give me the biggest of problems while in Dalaran mostly. Sometimes while in large-scale raids. And those are the times when I turn off shadow completely (low setting). I have an nVidia GTX 280, which is not bad, and can still run everything great on Ultra. But I'm so used to having WoW with basic shadows that I don't mind turning shadows off. _________________
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