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Shadows of the Lich King

By: Jarno Kokko Sep 02, 2008

Better Shadows, But Not Perfect

The new shadows are a major improvement over the existing precalculated "shadows" and blobs under the characters, NPCs and monsters. Yet they are far from perfect. In addition to the seaming visible on lower settings, there are a few other drawbacks and limitations. First of all, since the precalculated shadows are still there, and they can't be updated on the fly, the light source never moves. The sky changes based on the time of the day, but there are only four visibly different times of the day - night (Moon may be visible), dawn (light from NW, but no visible Sun), day (Sun may be visible), dusk (similar to dawn). The Sun and the Moon never move in the sky, and the global light always comes from the northwest direction. Same is true for indoors - your character keeps casting shadows based on the fixed position of the global light source, and no shadows are cast based on torches or other "local" light sources. Unfortunately this is pretty much unfixable without dumping the precalculated shadows - and ton of low end hardware users with it - so I don't think it's a big deal. To truly fix this would take a whole new engine, and that's best suited for a whole new game.

However, as the shadows are always cast to the direction of southeast, another flaw becomes apparent when cliffs or large buildings face to southeast and should cast shadows - the lack of self-shadowing for terrain. Here is a short video clip from Wyrmrest Temple in Dragonblight.

Terrain self-shadowing issue in action

(High quality XVID version - 20MB)

Note how at the lowest shadow level, the tower has a pre-calculated shadow, but as soon as you turn on the dynamic shadows from everything (extShadowQuality 2 and above), the shadow of the tower disappears. Instead you see only small shadows cast from the icy outcroppings of the tower. The key difference is that while the tower is part of the terrain, the icy outcroppings are objects placed on top of the underlying terrain. The engine casts shadows only from objects, not from the underlying terrain. Same problem is apparent with tall cliffs facing south/southeast/east - anyone on top of the cliff's edge will cast a shadow to the ground below, but the cliff itself casts no shadow.

This is not an issue with the trees or many of the fixtures placed on the terrain - those are separate objects for the shadow code, and do cast proper shadows - but if you have a tree on top of a cliff, the shadow may appear to look like a shadow of a floating tree. I sincerely hope that this issue is somehow resolved before Wrath of the Lich King goes live, as it's a major flaw in the visual look of the game in many locations.

Wyrmrest Temple after build 8905 with maximum shadows - the problem is gone.

UPDATE, 6th September: The improvements included in the latest build, 3.0.2.8905 to the graphics engine have partially solved this self-shadowing issue. Buildings now properly cast true dynamic shadows at higher shadow quality levels (extShadowQuality 2 through 6). The issue still remains in places where cliffs and other parts of the underlying terrain should be casting shadows to the side of the cliff and on the ground under the cliff. This fix has increased the visual quality of the new shadows tremendously. Performance has also improved somewhat.

As a side-effect, switching between shadow modes in build 8905 can cause shadows to "break" and end up bugged. Fortunately problem can be cleared with /console gxrestart (a command that completely restarts the rendering engine) for now, and I'm fairly sure that the problem will be fixed in the future.

Hardware Requirements Going Up

While Wrath of the Lich King is probably not going to change the minimum system requirements of the game that much, adding complex shadows to the mix asks for some real rendering hardware. Anyone playing World of Warcraft on integrated video chips such as Intel GMA X3500 (or worse), or with ATI's or NVIDIA's integrated solutions (Radeon X1050, GeForce 6150 etc.) should pretty much forget about it - none of these new shadow modes will run acceptably on your hardware, and you are stuck with the old shadows. You should also note that the added complexities of the world in Northrend will cut your framerate by roughly 10% when compared to Shattrath City - the current "worst framerate spot" in the game. If your system already struggles in Shattrath City, I do recommend looking for a hardware upgrade, but it's not mandatory to play.

But if you want the new shiny, anything short of a desktop with a current mid-range gaming video card won't run the shadows at an acceptable framerate, and the vast majority of laptops are straight out. In fact, if your system is a laptop, just tossing in a video card is not an option and you need a whole new laptop - so these results and suggestions are mostly for desktop systems. There are high-end laptops - mostly models with either GeForce 8800M or 9800M chips - or one from the ATI's upcoming Mobility Radeon HD4000 series, that can handle the shadows at a reasonable framerate in laptop form. Sadly laptops with gaming-oriented video chips on board tend to be very expensive. Any reasonably priced "gaming laptop" usually has a video chip that offers less than half the performance of a cheap desktop card like ATI Radeon HD 3850.