Blacksite Area51 shadow tweaks? help..

TheHunter · Sep 12, 2011

I noticed it uses weak shadowing system, low quality on some mountains and distant objects..

Is there any way to fix it?

This is what i found to tweak but idk all the values, or better yet idk their real purpose..

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one is found @ C:\Program Files (x86)\Midway Home Entertainment\BlackSite Area 51\Engine\Config

BaseEngine.ini

bEnableVSMShadows=False
bEnableBranchingPCFShadows=True
ShadowFilterQuality=0
BranchingPCFRadius=6 [default 3]
ParticleMinimumAlpha=0.02
DepthBias=.012
MinShadowResolution=32
MaxShadowResolution=1024 [default 512]

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the other @ C:\Program Files (x86)\Midway Home Entertainment\BlackSite Area 51\A52Game\Config

A52Engine.ini

AllowShadowVolumes=False
ShadowVolumeLightRadiusThreshold=1500 [default 1000]
ShadowVolumePrimitiveScreenSpacePercentageThreshold=0.25
bEnableVSMShadows=False
bEnableBranchingPCFShadows=True
ShadowFilterQuality=0
BranchingPCFRadius=6 [default 3]
ParticleMinimumAlpha=0.02
DepthBias=.012
MinShadowResolution=32
MaxShadowResolution=1024 [default 512]

D3DDrv.D3DRenderDevice]
DisableShaderModel3=False
ShadowScreenSpaceCullThreshold=8
ShadowScreenSpaceFourSampleThreshold=128.000000
ShadowScreenSpaceEightSampleThreshold=256.000000
DisableShadowQualityScaling=FALSE [default true]

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anybody? Jonas, i know you're a masta at this as well :nerd:

Year · Sep 11, 2011

believe it or not this is a game i absolutely love and amazingly i even finished it.

saldy i know nothing about tweaking shadows (i mean i can but i usually never do), they looked ok when i played it, however since its the unreal engine i'm sure someone will help.

but afaik and this is something i noticed with many cards, shadows on nvidia cards can be a little weird, for instance shadows in Just Cause 2 looked fantastic when i had the ATI card but the GTX480 don't render them as good, some shadows look "dotted" and or shimmer, don't render properly etc.

if so, then its quite possible that even with tweaks you might not be able to solve the shadow problem.

Damien_Azreal · Sep 11, 2011

Yes, the shadows in the game are extremely pixelated, and look very rough.
Blacksite had a horrible development cycle, the game we have and play is basically a very late alpha build. The game never got into proper beta stages or quality assurance testing.

I, like Year, love the game and have finished it a couple times. I also, from time to time, reinstall it and play some.
I've always thought there's a lot of potential in the game... and if there were ways, I'm sure some talented modders could do a lot with it.

TheHunter · Sep 11, 2011

yea i liked it too, was one of the rare "sucky" games i finished to end

Now im replaying it again, but i see the shadows could be better..Well last time i played i had 8800gts 320mb and it was a stutter fest because of low vram, now it runs like a dream but shadows look kinda weak..

I wanted to make them more detailed and less pixleated in the distance but idk the correct string/value.

i played with BranchingPCFRadius a bit, but idk what it really does.. i thought it would make a bigger radius of detailed shadow but its not it..

same with DisableShadowQualityScaling set to TRUE didnt change anything, then ShadowScreenSpaceCullThreshold raised to 12 and still nothing what i was hopping for..

Yea hehhe hopefully someone will know more? keep the ideas coming folks:nerd:

JonasBeckman · Sep 12, 2011

I couldn't reply to your PM due to the 2000 character limitation (4900 somewhere.) so here's the reply instead.

TheHunter said:

...Original message was here...

I've played the game and I believe it worked similar to other UE3 titles but it was some time ago so I am not entirely certain what exactly I did tweak but first you need to find the user folder, editing the base ini files is not recommended if it can be avoided (Partially to avoid UE3 protection where the game will crash if these are edited though this is mostly for later UE3 titles and those ini files are nearly always encrypted in some way but also because the changes here would be overwritten by the user ini files anyway so you would not see a difference.)

The tweaks I do are nearly the same for every UE3 title so I'll try to use a example below.

PoolSize=

This is often used as a sort of cache for streaming data, previously this varied between 300 to 400 but later titles drop as low as 140, higher should eliminate part of the delay when textures load from low-resolution to high-resolution so by default I use 500 here though to be honest I am a bit uncertain what the value corresponds to, it's not MB as far as I am aware.

bSmoothFrameRate=

I normally set this to false but while it does limit framerate it does so to keep things smooth and with less stuttering should you have framerate fluctuations, mostly a console addition as the hardware there sees more difference in FPS whereas most PC UE3 titles run at rather high framerates in most scenarios.
(Depending on additions like AA support, SSAO and other advancements like DX10 support.)

Then under the [SystemSettings] you'll find most other options though you've found those already since you found shadow resolution and similar.

I usually set MaxShadowResolution= to 2048 while only raising MinShadowResolution very slight, often from 32 to 64 as it will skip shadows entirely otherwise for certain objects unfortunately I am also fairly uncertain what VSM shadows and PCF branching shadows entail but I have not seen much of a difference in the game (Mass Effect 1) I tested most of these on but perhaps it's time to retry certain such alterations since UE3 has evolved a lot over the years. (It's not official but it's often referred to as UE3.5 now, unsure which build Blacksite uses though I believe it was a rather early UE3 title though of course not first-gen like Rainbow Six Vegas and RoboBlits where it was nearly like a heavily modified UE2.)

At worst what you are seeing could also be a byproduct of the usually really poor lod system so this banding effect is a result of the low detail environment in the distance, fixing this isn't really possible unfortuantely but hopefully the above tweaks can minimize the effect.

It can also be related to AMD/ATI and NVIDIA optimizations so try to rename the game exe or attempt to disable things like Catalyst AI (Not possible without third part utilities on 5000 series and above GPU models though, weird decision.) and for NVIDIA I believe the settings are a bit more spread out.

Setting high quality instead of quality for the filtering option usually disables most of these optimizations and performance remains largely unaffected in most cases.
(It really shouldn't be needed but some titles show pretty bad optimization hacks like for example Oblivion and Far Cry 2 to use two examples, it's a unfortunate result of trying to squeeze more performance out of the games via driver tweaks and over aggressive optimizations.)

Mostly this is just a few suggestions, UE3 can be adjusted fairly well via *Engine.ini which is normally in C:\Users\UsernameHere\My Documents\My Games or alternatively C:\Users\Username\Appdata\Local (alternatively Roaming) under the name of either the game, developer or company.)

Above examples are from WillowEngine.ini for Borderlands but are universal for nearly all UE3 titles.
(I apply the same tweaks globally to any UE3 game, of course this nearly always entails just the above alterations but at times the system values have stuff disabled you might want to enable or other way around to remove blur, bloom and dof effects for instance.)
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EDIT: The above should be fairly accurate but I might have made a mistake or gotten one of the settings and what it does a bit incorrect but I believe it's fairly solid and accurate.
(UE3 is fairly adjustable but the poor LOD system is not, which is highly unfortunate since nearly all UE3 titles use aggressive LOD culling to conserve performance which should be lessened a bit on stronger PC hardware, probably is though but rather minor.)
Click to expand...

Click to expand...

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Blacksite Area51 shadow tweaks? help..

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