Encountering Really Bad Light & Shadow Shifts & Flicker

[mooit]

Hi,

I'm using SSE 1.6.353.0

1. I have gone through all of my mods in MO2 disabling a few at a time to try and track this down, nothing worked.

2. I recreated the INI with Bethini using only HIgh settings, this also didn't work. I have also followed the Wiki guide with all the same INI settings.

3. I disabled DynDOLOD, then saved the game, then disabled xLODGen, TexGen, DynDOLOD in MO2 and restarted the game, it didn't work.

I have not been able to track down what is causing this, odd/rapid shifting, and flickering of light and shadows.

I've made a few videos, but please be aware, for the videos, so you can see this, the camera is being moved around extremely slow. But when I am moving around in the game at normal walking or running speeds, these shifts of light are extremely distracting, popping rapidly in an out of few all over the place, just bloody driving me crazy.

 

In this video, you will see shadow like movement going up the ramp on the left, and it also shimmers on the walls on the right too, next to the steps.

In this video, the bush on the upper right, next to the walkway, you will see the ground changing, also at 20 seconds, as I'm looking at the bush, there's a shift in light out across the Tundra.

Then when I face the look out on the left, the roof on the top also shifts with this shadow like effect. Next as I walk forward, at around 1:05-1:07 you can also see more flicker out in the Tundra.

Next I turn towards the archway, and the roof at the bottom shimmers, then the wall on the right side in several places.

What is causing all of this shimmer/flicker, I hope there is a solution to this?

THANKS

Edited May 3, 2023 by mooit

[DoubleYou]

This is normal. SSE splits the shadow map, and you are seeing where the split happens. You can adjust the Detailed Draw Distance, but in all reality, you are trading one issue for the next. One value looks good in one place, but terrible in the next. The values in the preset dropdown are the best compromises I could find for most scenes, but still, there are some scenes, like here, where the issues will be visible.

I would recommend that you install the Soft Shadows mod, which should help alleviate this vanilla game issue.

[mooit]

Hi DoubleYou,

Soft Shadows didn't change anything.

After posting this, I kept digging further, and I didn't consider before the fShadowDistance, I didn't think this had anything to do with the rendering/flickering I was seeing.

I used Ultra settings for Bethini then made everything pretty much like the Wiki and I ended up with fShadowDistance=5000.0000

I placed it on fShadowDistance=8000.0000

Now I hardly notice any of this, it's like it's cut out 95% of this, with just slight small movements here and there, hardly noticeable.

After just making up the number 8000, I then saw it mentioned here that 8000 is actually the Ultra setting.

https://stepmodifications.org/wiki/Guide:SkyrimPrefs_INI/Display#fShadowDistance

I guess for now, this is maybe the only solution fShadowDistance?

I'll go back and install Soft Shadows and see what it does now.

THANKS

P.S Do you think Shadow Boost is also good to use?

Edited May 3, 2023 by mooit

[mooit]

With fShadowDistance=8000.0000, the look so far has been the best I've been able to achieve, then I tried Soft Shadows again, and it exacerbates the issue. There is now actually more shadow rendering like having fShadowDistance on a lower value.

In the ENB Menu, when I disable and enable Soft Shadows, it doesn't diffuse or change the look of the shadows, nothing happens. The only thing the mod does, is create more shadows with more flickering shimmering like my videos.

Soft Shadows doesn't work...

THANKS

Edited May 3, 2023 by mooit

[mooit]

Hmm, I thought 8000 is the max for fShadowDistance, I ran Bethini over relooking over the Wiki and setting it HIGH, and it gave me;

fShadowDistance=8145.0000

[DoubleYou]

Shadow settings in the BethINI presets were designed to work together to limit the issue. Altering any of them from the presets may change the outcome.

Not sure why Soft Shadows isn't doing anything for you. It basically adjusts the poisson filter for shadows. I have not tried Shadow Boost yet. 

[mooit]

All I know is, running Skyrim vanilla, and letting it create the INI for the first time, then going back over the Bethini settings and putting it on High, has made an amazing difference. Now I only see slight slow fading in/out shadow movements, and no on screen flickering.

Not sure what I had messed up before in the INI, I thought I was very careful when I made other adjustments.

Soft Shadows was originally called Shadow Diffusion, as you may be aware of, as it Diffuses shadows, supposedly still does.

Look back at the images on the home page, showing a shadow under the archway at Riverwood, showing the shadow being diffused.

That Vanilla look of the shadow, when I enable Soft Shadows, mine stay exactly the same, I see no diffusion at all. The only thing I see Soft Shadows doing, is actually introducing more shadows on the map, and creating more shadow movement flicker/shimmer like the videos I posted. Soft Shadows looks really bad for some reason, and now I am using default INI settings too.

I get how shadows can also look diffused in the real world, but that vanilla look at Riverwood, shadows can also look very bold and prominent too. For me personally, that diffused look, doesn't really look like much of a shadow. I personally like that vanilla look better, diffused looks to washed out.

THANKS

 

Edited May 3, 2023 by mooit

[DoubleYou]

Glad to see that redoing the ini files from scratch fixed it for you. Shadows are especially finicky to get right, and I worked hard to find values to limit the problems with them.

I haven't played with Soft Shadows extensively, so I can't really speak much to it.

[mooit]

THANKS

[z929669]

4 hours ago, mooit said:

That Vanilla look of the shadow, when I enable Soft Shadows, mine stay exactly the same, I see no diffusion at all. The only thing I see Soft Shadows doing, is actually introducing more shadows on the map, and creating more shadow movement flicker/shimmer like the videos I posted. Soft Shadows looks really bad for some reason, and now I am using default INI settings too.

I get how shadows can also look diffused in the real world, but that vanilla look at Riverwood, shadows can also look very bold and prominent too. For me personally, that diffused look, doesn't really look like much of a shadow. I personally like that vanilla look better, diffused looks to washed out.

THANKS

 

I'm guessing it may have something to do with your ENB or post-processing configuration effectively overriding effects of Soft Shadows. You may want to check that Nexus topic and let us know if that's the case and what may be the specific cause.

I agree that Soft Shadows does diffuse the shadows a bit too much by default. I think making some adjustments to the INI will resolve, but I haven't taken the time yet to optimize that for Step.

[GameSetting]
fPoissonRadiusScaleBase = 4.00
fFirstSliceDistanceBase = 2000.00
fFirstSliceDistanceScale = 0.50

[Diffusion]
bEnabled = true
fDiffusionBase = 1.05
fDiffusionCurve = 4.00
fDiffusionMin = 1.00
fDiffusionMax = 10.00
fDiffusionInterior = 1.00

[ENBSeries]
fDawnMultiplier = 1.00
fSunriseMultiplier = 1.00
fDayMultiplier = 1.00
fSunsetMultiplier = 1.00
fDuskMultiplier = 1.00
fNightMultiplier = 1.00

NOTE: when I looked at the INI via Mod Information in MO, I found three strange characters at the beginning of the file before the left bracket of [GameSetting]. I suspect these are non-ascii chars hidden in many text editors. i removed them in case they nullified that setting or possibly the whole INI, so you may want to verify.

Re-downloaded to illustrate:

TextPad and NotePad++ don't reveal this issue

[DoubleYou]

I wouldn't recommend editing it in MO2 if it had those characters. Could be that it expects an alternate encoding that MO2 does not support but other text editors do, and could invalidate the file. 

[Greg]

8 hours ago, z929669 said:

NOTE: when I looked at the INI via Mod Information in MO, I found three strange characters at the beginning of the file before the left bracket of [GameSetting]. I suspect these are non-ascii chars hidden in many text editors. i removed them in case they nullified that setting or possibly the whole INI, so you may want to verify.

Re-downloaded to illustrate:

TextPad and NotePad++ don't reveal this issue

This is the UT-8 Byte Order Mark (EF BB BF or ) and I agree it should be removed from the INI file. I think the easy way to remove the byte order mark is to edit the file in Notepad++, change Encoding from UTF-8 BOM to UTF-8, and save the file. This has no impact on the encoding because UF-8 is a simple 8-bit stream and the byte order mark is not recommended with UTF-8 encoding.

[z929669]

2 hours ago, Greg said:

This is the UT-8 Byte Order Mark (EF BB BF or ) and I agree it should be removed from the INI file. I think the easy way to remove the byte order mark is to edit the file in Notepad++, change Encoding from UTF-8 BOM to UTF-8, and save the file. This has no impact on the encoding because UF-8 is a simple 8-bit stream and the byte order mark is not recommended with UTF-8 encoding.

Thanks for the explanation. I was able to remove it easily from the MO integrated editor without issue. In the meantime, I posted a 'bug' on the mod for Doodle to consider updating in the Nexus file. I don't know if this encoding 'breaks' the config file or not.

[Greg]

1 hour ago, z929669 said:

Thanks for the explanation. I was able to remove it easily from the MO integrated editor without issue. In the meantime, I posted a 'bug' on the mod for Doodle to consider updating in the Nexus file. I don't know if this encoding 'breaks' the config file or not.

This is a really old StackOverflow question that says it did not recognize the BOM in 2008. The private profile API may have been updated more recently to account for this, but I think Microsoft considers this API obsolete.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/124786/getprivateprofilestring-oddity

[ButchDiavolo]

19 hours ago, z929669 said:

Thanks for the explanation. I was able to remove it easily from the MO integrated editor without issue. In the meantime, I posted a 'bug' on the mod for Doodle to consider updating in the Nexus file. I don't know if this encoding 'breaks' the config file or not.

I went through all the ini's that I have and saw that ENB Lights For Effect Shaders also has those characters. Opening in Notepad++ and resaving in UTF-8 made them disappear.

Edit: in fact, ALL of PO3's mods have those characters in their ini files.

Edited May 5, 2023 by ButchDiavolo

[DoubleYou]

Do they still work after removing the characters?