Light Shadows Overhaul

Have you ever wondered why the normal lighting looks off in this game?

Especially when the lighting in this game looks great with the normal sky light or just during cutscenes?

If you've ever looked at the lights from lanterns or fires, whether they be in towns or in dialogue, you may notice that they don't cast any shadows! Consequently, this leads to light leakage behind objects too.

This mod enables shadows for various lights in this game, giving it a more grounded look.

Although, keep in mind that lights are only visible in lesser-lit areas, so during the day you won't see much of an effect.

To consider:

Disable "Shadow Tweaks" in Camera Light Remover for an extra character shadow!

There is a small performance hit with this mod, and from what I could notice, I went from ~100 fps to 95 fps after enabling.

If you feel it's needed, there is an additional toggle to disable the mod outside of villages.

After a lot of trial and error, I've adjusted it so that the shadow pop-in shouldn't be too noticeable, at least when compared to Capcom's LOD pop-in.

Though when there are a lot of lights in the scene, you will notice some pop-in, at least for character shadows

Installation:

Either install through Fluffy Mod Manager or drop the files into the game folder.

Technical details/how this mod works:

There are three main types of lights in this game: Directional (sky light), PointLights (lanterns, braziers), and SpotLights (cone-shaped lights). Each light uses a different amount of shadow maps, e.g. Directional uses 3 shadow maps, SpotLights use 1, and PointLights use 6.

The engine has a render limit of 7 character shadow maps and 7 background shadow maps (where the background shadow maps don't render any moving objects, e.g. characters or flags). This is a problem when enabling shadows for multiple different lights.

From what I've seen, Capcom doesn't seem to enable background shadows for lights, nor do they use all of the character shadow maps. Assuming the sky light is the only shadow casting light in the scene, we are left with 11 shadow maps total to work with (4 character, 7 background). This mod has to carefully work around that budget, so some optimizations are in order.

Most lights in this games are PointLights, however enabling shadows for a single PointLight essentially disallows having shadows for any other light due to them rendering 6 maps. As the sky light renders 3 character shadow maps, PointLights aren't even able to cast character shadows as they would need 6 to actually work.

In order to work around this, the mod replaces each PointLight with three SpotLights pointing down and another SpotLight pointing up. The SpotLights pointing down are used to cast shadows, whereas the top isn't as important.

This method essentially hal