Ludicrous Zoom Bug - shadows don't render for objects on right side of screen

:arrow_forward: GAME INFORMATION

:point_down: These details are CRITICAL; DO NOT skip them or your issue may not be reviewed.

  • GAME BUILD #: latest build on steam / windows sotre
  • GAME PLATFORM: Steam / Windows Store
  • OPERATING SYSTEM: Windows 11

:arrow_forward: ISSUE EXPERIENCED

:point_down: DESCRIBE THE ISSUE IN DETAIL (below). LIMIT TO ONE BUG PER THREAD.

See title. Basically right side of the screen doesn’t render shadows / possibly other graphics or shader details. Could be a LOD distance scaling issue, idk. Happens 100% on Windows Store and Steam version of the game.

:arrow_forward: FREQUENCY OF ISSUE

:point_down: How often does the issue occur? CHOSE ONE; DELETE THE REST!

  • 100% of the time / matches I play (ALWAYS)
    Edit: can repro on windows store version and on a different system (3070 TI).

:arrow_forward: ############ STEPS

Here’s the steps to reproduce the issue:

  1. 4K or higher (8K) resolution.
  2. Make sure settings are at max.
  3. Make sure ludicrous zoom is on.
  4. Move the map around while keeping buildings / objects / whatever in screen, and see that the shadows won’t render.

I’m on RTX 4090, but also reproducible with a 3080 and 3070 Ti using a wide range of nvidia drivers.

:arrow_forward: EXPECTED RESULT

:point_down: What was SUPPOSED to happen if the bug you encountered were not present?

Shadows should render.

:arrow_forward: IMAGE

:point_down: ALWAYS attach a PICTURE (.jpg, .png, .gif) or VIDEO (.mp4, YouTube link) that highlights the problem.

4 Likes

bumping this up, since there’s no reason this bug should have made it to production with some basic sanity testing

edit: Your post was flagged as inappropriate : the community feels it is offensive, abusive, to be hateful conduct or a violation of our community guidelines. really guys?

Reminds me of this

Still haven’t heard back, and it still has yet to be resolved :frowning: Such a glaring issue, hoping it can at least be acknowledged.

Is this a joke? A full patch later, this bug is still ignored. Not even acknowledged.

Hilarious since this is 100% REPRODUCIBLE ON ANY SETUP.

It’s a noncritical bug in one of the more technically difficult fields (graphcs engineering). It probably has a low priority on the devs’ issue list.

Also, note that Ludicrous Zoom is under the “Beta Settings” category in the options. As long as it’s labeled that, it’s still considered an incomplete feature, with all that entails. (Though I’m not sure the Reddit video I linked is recorded under Ludicrous Zoom.)

1 Like

just responding here to bring attention back to it, they don’t have this issue in AOM retold (same engine), and it ironically had shadows working properly initially


ruins other wise clear presentation, ik ludicrous zoom is in beta tab, but its been 3 years, it has make it out of there at some point

This has been bugging me for some time to the point that I gave up playing certain maps that exhibit this problem. I actually made a post about this particular bug on the Steam Community: Incomplete shadows/shaders on Plymouth map :: Age of Empires III: Definitive Edition Game Bugs

Based on my experience, ludicrous zoom isn’t the cause of the shader issue. Some maps have this issue, others don’t. It’s the position of the lighting and the map size that matters because larger maps are more prone to this problem. For example, if you play 2v2 on Plymouth, the map size is pretty small and there won’t be a lighting/shader issue. But, if you play 4v4, the map size increases a bit and it’s enough to start seeing the lack of shaders on the right side of the map. If you enable “Large” mode in Plymouth with 8 players total, the shader issue is a lot more evident. It’s extremely annoying.

Here are a handful of maps that have this issue, especially if you play with 8 players or if you enable “Large” mode:

Plymouth

Panama

Manchuria

Parallel Rivers

Mexico

New England

Ireland

Italy

The ultimate and easy way to know which map has the shader issue is to open Scenario Editor and launch the same map with different iterations each time (e.g. number of players and large mode) and compare.

For the maps that have the shader issue, you can try switching the lighting to, say, “age302_texas” or “age3zhb1,” and you can see that the shader issue should disappear – hence, the default “position” of lighting for the associated map is what I think is wrong and needs adjusting.

I really, really hope they will fix this issue…

1 Like

new england is effected regardless of the size picked
also, this isn’t noticable in campaigns as you can see below


if the issue appeared here then anything right of the town center would show first fading shadows and trees on the right would be unshaded, but thats clearly not the case

I confused the New England map with Plymouth since they have almost the same layout. I actually don’t have any shader issues in New England regardless of its size and the number of teams in it. But it’s interesting that you have it on that map though…

As for the campaign maps, they shouldn’t have any shader issues because they’re small in size (area-wise). This basically aligns with what I mentioned earlier, which is that there seems to be a correlation between map size and shader issues. Smaller-sized maps (campaigns included) tend not to have the shader issue, but once the size of the same map increases, the shader issue becomes evident and more prevalent. I used the Plymouth map as the perfect example to depict this.

Another map with the shader issue I forgot to include is Hokkaido. On the 4v4 version, there are no shader issues, but once I enabled the “large” option, the shader issue came up on the right-hand side of the map.

To be clear, not all maps have the shader issue. For example, the Texas and Great Plains maps run fine for me. Both of these maps don’t give me a shader issue regardless of size and number of teams.

I’m guessing that the lighting, which includes the shaders/shadows, isn’t matching the larger-sized maps. Although the shaders/shadows look great on small-sized maps, it’s as if the devs didn’t reposition it to the center of the larger map version or perhaps they didn’t expand the range of the shaders/shadows enough to accommodate the right-hand side of the larger version of the respective maps. Whichever the case, this should be an easy fix for them.

when the issue pops up its regardless of maps size, thats what i’m finding anyway, certain light presets just aren’t showing properly, i actually tried few of these maps with broken lighting with day night cycle official mod enabled, that mod suffered no issues so a small mod with single light preset should be able to fix it up, at least till its officially patched up

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I’m having this issue in the campaign. Only solution I’ve found is to just not zoom out too far. Weird that the problem is only on the right side of the screen.

You’re talking about certain areas of certain maps having incomplete shaders. The issue OP is talking about is the right side of the screen not rendering any shadows on any maps.

The issue only occurs with Ludicrous Zoom enabled. At max zoom-out, about 1/3 of the screen, on the right side, will not render any shadows. The closer you zoom-in towards where ‘default max zoom-out’ would be without Ludicrous Zoom enabled, the less amount of right-side screen space is affected by the bug. There is no issue whatsoever with Ludicrous Zoom disabled.

i posted the Lighting fix mod which should help with regular matches, just make sure to turn off bloom, as its extremely overkill on desert and snow maps, can’t say it’ll do the same in campaigns, but not all of campaigns suffer from this
Lighting fix temporary - Mods - Age of Empires