GitLab

Rendering shadow maps for things a long way away takes a lot of time because distant shadow maps cover a lot of area, and so have a lot of things in them.

One or more of the following may help:

• A heuristic in QuadTreeWorld based on maximum steepness in a cell and the angle of the sun in the sky which affects the ComputeLightSpaceBounds visitor. This would stop terrain which isn't slopey enough to cast a shadow from expanding the shadow map.
• A maximum shadow map distance setting.
  • This could potentially even be tied to the current framerate for more consistent performance like this Fallout 4 mod
  • A naive implementation (i.e. just setting the existing OSG setting) looks really bad with the current shadow cascade selection mechanism, so more work than just that would be needed. We've got a slightly-better-than-naive implementation that works fine.
• Rejecting terrain drawables over a certain distance from the view point. This would stop distant mountains casting shadows, but would still allow terrain shadows for short distances.