Guild Wars 2

This may be less of a bug and more of a design decision, but I am not sure. I posted once about this during a beta stress test, but I think it may have been deleted and I don’t think I ever saw a reply to it.

It appears that self-shadowing for my player character becomes enabled when you move the “Shaders” graphics setting from medium to high. The oddity that I am experiencing is that the only light source that interacts with the character’s self-shadowing is a new light that gets created off the right side of the screen in camera space. This results in an odd strobing effect when you rotate the camera around, as the self shadows pass by different pieces of armor and onto my character’s feet.

One of the ways that this breaks down the overall look and feel of the game is when I get a nice environmental shadow cast over my character, shadowing him completely, and then the right side of him is illuminated by some invisible source. It also becomes apparent if you’re standing in the light and move your camera so that your character’s shadow is to the right of the screen, and then the bright side gets cast from right to left into the shadow.

Anyway, not sure if it’s a bug, a limitation, or a deliberate decision but I felt it warranted discussion.

What are some other possible implementations of this? Is it possible to find the direction from your character’s location to the “sun” light source for a scene and then set the self-shadowing directional light to always orient in that direction? Or maybe the nearest light source for interior areas?