Shaders, Shadows, and Anti-aliasing

EverQuest 2 does not natively support Anti-aliasing, however determined players have managed to enable it by adding “r_aa_blit” to their EQ2 INI file. Unfortunately, players will have to wait a bit longer if they want to experience Shaders 3.0 and Anti-aliasing at the same time. Players attempting to use both will see zones which are entirely blacked out. From Imago-Quem:

I just submitted a fix for this. Hopefully it passes QA and can get out to you in a hotfix here soon and you can run AA with Shader 3.

And as for the prospect of using CPU Shadows with Shaders 3.0, Imago-Quem gives us the backstory after the jump, and it’s not promising:

CPU shadows are not currently working with Shader 3.0. They are, as you saw, forced to GPU shadows. I would really like to get them working.

Here’s why they’re not working yet: Our Shader 1.0 system uses the shadow (stored in a stencil buffer) to mask out shadowed regions on its lighting shaders. Each shader is layered on top of each other to draw different aspects of a single object (e.g. soft lights, reflective shine, object color layers, metallic reflections, transparency, distortion, etc.).

Shader 3.0 has all effects combined into a single layer per object. These are rendered with one single draw call per geometrical shape. This prevents usage of the stencil buffer for EQ2’s Shader 3.0 CPU stencil shadows since DirectX 9 doesn’t allow you to use the stencil buffer to mask sections within a shader. It only works against the whole shader.

I will have to either completely re-write the Shader 3 engine and 5,000 shaders, write up a GPU stencil shader technique and feed the data into the 3.0 shaders as textures, or come up with some other crazy idea to get them working. It’s more likely I’ll be getting GPU shadows working indoors first. With anything good there are sadly always tradeoffs.

Ryan clearly sees room for improvement in the GPU Shadows, as per this response:

I plan to add the tree animations into the GPU shadows…but planning is one thing, doing is another. Hopefully I’ll get some time soon to do touch ups on the GPU shadows for things like this.

Even with their flaws and limitations, I feel that GPU Shadows look good in many instances.