Massively Screwed Up Shadows.

[Kunaak]

<p>my shadows are now indredibly messed up, sometimes the entire screen goes black from the shadows all messing up.</p><p>its worst in areas like deep forge - but seems to happen everywhere - messing with in game shadows does not seem to change, or fix anything.</p>

[Loogi]

<p>You are not the only one. I called tech support for help and from what I gather, this is a known bug/issue/feature? The temp work around they gave me was:</p><p><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA;">-Open the ‘Options’ menu in game-Open the ‘Display’ tab-Expand the ‘Performance’ section-Move the ‘Complex shader distance’ slider all the way to the left </span></p><p><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA;">the number result is -1. for me, if I move it off that, then the issue returns. Hope this helps for a temp fix.</span></p>

[Kunaak]

<p>hey that atleast made it playable again...</p><p>hope they fix this soon, it really screws with my raiding.</p>

[TSR-KenC]

<p>It may be necessary to gather the system information of folks running into that specific issue, though we'll send some PMs out should that be the case. Otherwise, that temp fix should hold for now.</p>

[Imago-Quem]

<p><cite>Loogi@Befallen wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>You are not the only one. I called tech support for help and from what I gather, this is a known bug/issue/feature? The temp work around they gave me was:</p><p><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: ">-Open the ‘Options’ menu in game-Open the ‘Display’ tab-Expand the ‘Performance’ section-Move the ‘Complex shader distance’ slider all the way to the left </span></p><p><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: ">the number result is -1. for me, if I move it off that, then the issue returns. Hope this helps for a temp fix.</span></p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>If this is a shadow issue, does turning off shadows not fix it?</strong></span></p>

[Animul]

<p>Turning off shadows does not fix the problem.</p><p>I just set my settings to balanced and the problem is gone, the game doesn't look as good but is at least playable.</p><p>While it is messed up I did notice framerates were around 130-160..I think its because it doesn't have to draw but the small area you can see.</p>

[Kunaak]

<p>almost nothing seems to fix it except the -1 trick.</p><p>heres some pics of the exact problem, and as you can see, its pretty bad. makes raids and instances nearly impossible to do.</p><p><a href="http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/posts/list.m?topic_id=459431">http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/...topic_id=459431</a></p>

[Loogi]

<p><cite>Imago-Quem wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Loogi@Befallen wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>You are not the only one. I called tech support for help and from what I gather, this is a known bug/issue/feature? The temp work around they gave me was:</p><p><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: ">-Open the ‘Options’ menu in game-Open the ‘Display’ tab-Expand the ‘Performance’ section-Move the ‘Complex shader distance’ slider all the way to the left </span></p><p><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: ">the number result is -1. for me, if I move it off that, then the issue returns. Hope this helps for a temp fix.</span></p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>If this is a shadow issue, does turning off shadows not fix it?</strong></span></p></blockquote><p>No it doesnt. I tried playing with that before calling tech support. I updated drivers, sent in a dxdiag and other information and even if I move it off the -1, everything gets funky.</p><p>Is there a way to disable the dynamic lighting. Before the update, if I was standing in my guildhall, regardless of time, the light stayed the same. now when its game "night" everything gets darker and while not game breaking, is a bit annoying.</p><p>Edit: spelling</p>

[Yivvits]

<p>Same problem here since the update. Setting the complex shader distance to -1 is a workaround.</p><p>Maybe I just never noticed it before but that slider exists in both the performance and shadow sections of the graphics options.</p>

[Kunaak]

<p>is there anything being done about this?</p><p>cause the -1 trick only works in brightly lit zones. zones like lavastorm, deep forge, ward of elements, still go nuts even with the -1 trick.</p><p>the worst areas I can note, have been the hole where "Digg" is located in WoE, and the Entrance to the caves off the beach at lavastorm. but the shadow bug shows up to small degrees in every zone, even with the -1 trick.</p><p>all -1 does is minimize the effect so its not has consistently bad.</p><p>but the effect comes back just as bad in darkly lit zones.</p>

[CSR-DanielH]

<p>Looks like another player fixed this issue by updating their graphics driver, I'd give that a shot if you haven't already:</p><p><a href="http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/posts/list.m?topic_id=459431" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/...topic_id=459431</a></p>

[Novafoxx]

<p>Still having this problem after updating my drivers to the latest Nvidia release drivers.</p>

[TSR-DanielH]

<p><cite>CSR-DanielH wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Looks like another player fixed this issue by updating their graphics driver, I'd give that a shot if you haven't already:</p><p><a rel="nofollow" href="http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/posts/list.m?topic_id=459431" target="_blank">http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/...topic_id=459431</a></p></blockquote><p>Another DanielH?  <em>THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!</em></p><p><span style="text-decoration: line-through;">Does anyone have a specific area this is happening that is in an easily accessible overland zone?  I want to recreate this error on my end and try a couple of possible fixes.</span></p><p>Nevermind, the cave entrance to lavastorm mentioned earlier should work.</p>

[TSR-DanielH]

<p>Update: I'm unable to recreate this issue using an 8800 w/ 12/26/2008 drivers.  I'll try with my GTX280 and several different driver versions when I get home.</p>

[Kunaak]

<p>please fix this... this is getting ridiculous.</p><p>I raid 4 nights a week, 3 hours a night, rather high end content, and sometimes this issue makes me just a liability to the raid.</p><p>the other night on Mynzak, everytime I got the purple vision, I could hardly see anything, cause the screen would go 75% black, with even the slightest touch of the mouse.</p><p>zones like deep forge, all of lavastorm, zarrakon, and pretty much any encounter that has a "Vision" red- purple and so on, are all really badly effected by this.</p><p>this only became a issue after GU53, I had used the same drivers for almost a year, cause if it aint broke, dont mess with it.... but even this bug made me try the newest Nvidia Drivers and still the same issue.</p><p>I use profit UI, raid in "raid settings" in profit. tried in game "extreme performance", and that does nothing. I raid in low settings simply cause as an assassin, if I raid in high settings, with all the magic and stuff on the screen I can hardly see anything, and often loose the back of a mob, so I just raid in low settings.</p><p>if you set the game to quality, or higher, the issue goes away, but its nearly impossible to raid like that.</p><p>ward of elements drops down to 10 FPS or less, most X4 raid zones are just too hard to see anything if you have all the effects on.</p><p>I've tried going to Quality settings, then dumbing down the graphics manually, but I cant seem to get the FPS high enough, or Bland enough to where I can actually raid, and see the targets - cause simply put, theres too much fireworks going off to see anything.</p><p>so I just have to keep on the Raid settings and the -1 trick.</p><p>but thats a work around, it doesnt make the effect go away, just makes it not happen so constantly.</p>

[Sparxx]

<p>I have an HP 9340f with a GeForce 9500GS on Vista-64 (Home Premium).  This hardware is all original from the factory.</p><p>I am receiving the same symptoms.  When I initially saw this, my first instinct was to update the Video Card Driver to the latest release.  This did NOT help.</p><p>I posted in another thread that seems to be about the same issue, but since not sure which one is getting monitored, i will say some of the same things.</p><p>1.  I noticed that the problem seemed to go away when i put graphics on balanced.</p><p>2.  If i had other players in front of me, the problem did not seem to occur.</p><p>3.  If I was not in balanced and I experienced the problem, I can force the graphics to display correctly by pulling up the inventory window.</p><p>4.  I was able to get the problem to go away by setting the complex shader distance to -1 as was mentioned above in this thread.  However, it is very dark compared to the settings that I usually play on.  Though this works as a temporary workaround, it is, by no means, a fix.</p><p>My laptop has the same issue.  It is running on the onboard intel graphics card.   Neither machine had this problem until GU53.</p><p>I hope some of this information is helpful.  I am glad to know more people are experiencing this issue, as i think the more data and more individuals experiencing the problem, the faster they can identify and fix the problem.</p>

[Loogi]

<p>For those people using Nvdia graphics cards, on the 5th they released an updated driver. This seems to have corrected the issue. The driver number is 191.xx. Will keep everyone posted on how it is working. But so far so good.</p>

[Sparxx]

<p>Thanks for the info on the new driver.  </p><p>I updated to new nVidia Driver.  Within 2 minutes was able to recreate the issue.  Did not fix the issue for me.</p>