New shadow leaks in 2.12 dev builds

[MirceaKitsune]

Wasn't sure if I should still post this since the mystery was somewhat solved, but just to confirm this case can be found in the wild with FM's other than mine: Yesterday I played Chronicles of Skulduggery 0: To Catch a Thief. There's a door up on a terrace (I can reinstall it and go there to get a viewpos if anyone's interested) which upon picking and opening will cause the light on the back of the wall indoor to slightly shine on the floor outside through the entire wall.

Exact same camera position / angle in both images so you can just overlap the two screenshots to see the difference, though if you look at the bottom left ground it's pretty clear what happens once the door is opened. It's still a bit weird: The wall module model should still be casting a shadow, even if the wall brush uses caulk and not shadow caulk. Whatever the case a few FM's out there seem to have this problem, even if it's not an issue the engine or building modules can resolve I wonder if mappers can be better put on notice about it since like me most are likely not aware this is a thing or what causes it.

Looked at the first post again and the video attached to it: Definitely seems like the same thing. Most importantly it wasn't doing this in earlier versions which I didn't realize... I'm seeing the clarification by Stgatilov as well which I initially missed, I definitely prefer the performance optimization but now I do wonder if something can also be done about this eventually.

Edited November 14, 2023 by MirceaKitsune

[stgatilov]

11 hours ago, MirceaKitsune said:

Wasn't sure if I should still post this since the mystery was somewhat solved, but just to confirm this case can be found in the wild with FM's other than mine

Yes, you still should.
We don't know what we are going to do with these issues.
Without knowing how many of them exist, we can't make a decision.

Quote

(I can reinstall it and go there to get a viewpos if anyone's interested)

Viewpos is imbued in image filenames, although some guessword is left for minuses.
It is at 2800 -1020 -515.

[datiswous]

On 11/14/2023 at 5:37 AM, MirceaKitsune said:

Yesterday I played Chronicles of Skulduggery 0: To Catch a Thief. There's a door up on a terrace (I can reinstall it and go there to get a viewpos if anyone's interested) which upon picking and opening will cause the light on the back of the wall indoor to slightly shine on the floor outside through the entire wall.

I think I mentioned Bienie about this during beta testing and thought he fixed it.

Spoiler

 

 

Edited November 20, 2023 by datiswous

[MirceaKitsune]

I'm seeing the weirdest thing on my map, not public yet but I have the case for testing: Not only does the light leak, and it does so even as I've textured the walls with shadowcaulk... a light actually leaks only while the door is closed, once I open it the undesired light goes away.

It's the glow on the left side of the door and little triangle it casts on the floor in front of it. I think it might be the light at the right shining through though, not sure if it's the light in the newly opened room. The interesting thing is opening the door makes it go away, also using shadowcaulk over mere caulk doesn't seem to matter which is quite odd.

[stgatilov]

9 hours ago, MirceaKitsune said:

I'm seeing the weirdest thing on my map, not public yet but I have the case for testing: Not only does the light leak, and it does so even as I've textured the walls with shadowcaulk... a light actually leaks only while the door is closed, once I open it the undesired light goes away.

I guess this is some kind of issue with blocked portals.
I think I need to create a test map.

Is the light moving all the time?
Does anything change if you move door/visportal a bit? Maybe visportal is exactly on the surface of door bounding box?

[MirceaKitsune]

58 minutes ago, stgatilov said:

I guess this is some kind of issue with blocked portals.
I think I need to create a test map.

Is the light moving all the time?
Does anything change if you move door/visportal a bit? Maybe visportal is exactly on the surface of door bounding box?

Static lights only, lights should be cutting through the portals by far, however one is rotated by 45* on the wall which could perhaps be related. Here's a DarkRadiant screenshot for now, showing the setup best as it can be seen... I selected both the interior and exterior light entities that might be involved.

Edited November 18, 2023 by MirceaKitsune

[stgatilov]

Does the issue happen with r_useLightPortalFlow 1 or r_useLightPortalFlow 0 ?

If it does, then it should happen in 2.11 as well.

[MirceaKitsune]

5 hours ago, stgatilov said:

Does the issue happen with r_useLightPortalFlow 1 or r_useLightPortalFlow 0 ?

If it does, then it should happen in 2.11 as well.

It seems to happen with either, yes.

[MirceaKitsune]

I'm afraid the light leaks persist even in dev16854-10518 with a change I understand should fix them on old maps. Just replaying Chronicles of Skulduggery 3: Sacricide and found an area where they're even worse and a light in another room shines straight through the wall.

A view from the back of the light shining through: Even from this angle you can see it light up the room through the door.

Edited November 30, 2023 by MirceaKitsune

[nbohr1more]

13 hours ago, MirceaKitsune said:

I'm afraid the light leaks persist even in dev16854-10518 with a change I understand should fix them on old maps. Just replaying Chronicles of Skulduggery 3: Sacricide and found an area where they're even worse and a light in another room shines straight through the wall.

A view from the back of the light shining through: Even from this angle you can see it light up the room through the door.

The impacted missions have not been edited yet. If you wish to assist further, set con_noPrint 0 and getviewpos 1 then capture screens and post them to the authors mission thread.

[stgatilov]

On 11/30/2023 at 5:45 PM, nbohr1more said:

The impacted missions have not been edited yet. If you wish to assist further, set con_noPrint 0 and getviewpos 1 then capture screens and post them to the authors mission thread.

To be honest, perhaps it's better to make a wiki page for this kind of issues.

Most of the authors probably won't fix the missions themselves.

[Daft Mugi]

@stgatilov

I'm curious why this solution was chosen:

• "forceShadowBehindOpaque" "1" on an entity means it will always cast shadows from any light, even if it is fully behind wall/opaque brushes.
• "forceAllShadowsBehindOpaque" "1" on worldspawn causes all entities to get forceShadowBehindOpaque flag automatically.

This requires all of the missions to be playtested to discover issues and then updated. A seemingly impossible task.

Why not the following solution?:

• "enableShadowOptimizations" worldspawn

This is something that DarkRadiant could add automatically to new missions. For existing missions that could benefit a lot from the optimizations, such as The Painter's Wife, Written in Stone, Iris, etc., they could be edited to include the optimization worldspawn.

[stgatilov]

I can't say I like it

But many missions seem to work fine with new optimizations.
Even New Job, which I guess was the showcase of "architecture modules" (models everywhere instead of brushes), looks fine.

Even if you set "disabled" as default, you will still have to playtest all the missions in order to enable it back where it works. The same seemingly impossible task.
Except that getting a report for wrong lighting is very likely, while getting a report for a missed optimization opportunity is basically impossible.

[stgatilov]

On 11/14/2023 at 5:37 AM, MirceaKitsune said:

Note: happens at 2800 -1020 -515

This issue on cos0_thief happens even with old settings, although the leak becomes a bit "wider" with new settings.
I believe this location is broken beyond the 2.12 changes.

[stgatilov]

I have created wiki page:

• https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=New_light_leaks_in_2.12

For now:

• ws1_north:  put into the table. Global workaround applied.
• cos3_sacricide: I confirmed the issue, put it into the table. Perhaps wait for more cases on this map to decide whether to workaround it locally or globally.
• cos0_thief: As I noted just above, I believe this cases to be broken on 2.11 too, so I did not put it into the table.

[MirceaKitsune]

Was about to say the issue happens with both shadow maps and stencil shadows. Then I remembered I have r_shadowMapCullFront enabled since it improves performance a little. That explains why I get those leaks even more than everyone else

[datiswous]

These are from WS2 Home Again. I don't know if they're related.

[stgatilov]

3 hours ago, datiswous said:

These are from WS2 Home Again. I don't know if they're related.

The first one happens with old cvar values and shadow maps, so it is something different.

The second one is indeed this problem.
I also added two more cases on this map to the table.

I guess I'll just apply the global workaround here.
And I suspect similar fate will be for most of Grayman's missions...

[datiswous]

1 hour ago, stgatilov said:

The first one happens with old cvar values and shadow maps, so it is something different.

I have stencil shadows enabled. What are those old cvars?

Btw. I was still using last dev version, because the beta came in when I was playing it. Now I upgraded to b1 and started playing ws3 (with subtitles).

Edited December 22, 2023 by datiswous

[datiswous]

1 hour ago, stgatilov said:

I guess I'll just apply the global workaround here.

If you are going to update the mission, maybe you could include the subtitles I just made. I guess it's not very important though:

 

Edited December 22, 2023 by datiswous

[nbohr1more]

Yes, we will take both

[nbohr1more]

1 hour ago, datiswous said:

If you are going to update the mission, maybe you could include the subtitles I just made. I guess it's not very important though:

 

Actually, if you are up for it... EFX reverb too ?

[datiswous]

1 hour ago, nbohr1more said:

Actually, if you are up for it... EFX reverb too ?

I have never done that, but I'm interested in it. So I might do that, but I don't know when. I guess it makes sense in line with non-map upgrades and fixes.

[nbohr1more]

No worries.

If you wanna try, it's not too difficult, especially with the v2 "presets".

The tricky part is ensuring the location entity is inside the middle of an area and that location separators enclose the area.

I've actually done this by editing the map file in a text editor and making the entities match locations of other entities like door handles for the separators and vases (etc) for the location. It's easier to do in DR if you are a DR veteran of course.

https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Setting_Reverb_Data_of_Rooms_(EAX)

[stgatilov]

8 hours ago, datiswous said:

I have stencil shadows enabled. What are those old cvars?

Btw. I was still using last dev version, because the beta came in when I was playing it. Now I upgraded to b1 and started playing ws3 (with subtitles).

See this wiki page: https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=New_light_leaks_in_2.12

I have bound changing both cvars + reloadModels to [ and ] respectively.
I guess I'll toggle them a lot in the nearest future.