Shadow graphics option needed - only disable player made shadows and not environment

Everybody knows about this problem:
Outside of the battle I can keep shadows and graphics on ultra settings with perfect fps.
Once I enter the battle, once many players start appearing, my fps starts to drop and it becomes necessary to turn the shadows off.
For the player himself there is no downside in turning off shadows...It makes everything much more visible, easier to shoot at, fps stays constant.


But what view does this give to people who see Planetside 2 for the first time? This is the graphics setting most Youtubers and Twitch streamers use.
Without the shadow visuals this game turns into the most hideous and disgusting looking game ever.
2004 games look better than PS2 without shadows, It's 2020.

Ignore the Tutorials, Mentors, death cam nonsense, graphics need to be worked on desperately!





Environment shadows should be something that cannot be disabled, instead only allow only player made shadows off because that's what causes the FPS drop.
Not only to keep the game visuals good but also for balance reasons...

Having shadow visuals on in fights (with no fps drop) is just asking to lose. It's such an extreme visual downside keeping the shadows on. As you can compare in the 2 screenshots, you can see how clear and visible everything is without shadows on.

This is discouraging players to use the shadow settings and in conclusion advertise the game with the worst visuals.

It's not just ps2 it's the FPS genre,
The less stress that you put on your computer the higher your framerate will be,
And this genre relies on lightning fast reflexes and buttery smooth framerates.

You do bring up a good point about shadows being a huge handicap though!
Now-a-days I play on ultra everything, always, but it's a massive self nerf.

Almost everything is easier on lower settings, brighter nights, less foliage, no bloom, no glare,
no big bright tracers, minimal smoke, no shadows making things dark,
You can actually see through you spawnroom shields and sundy cloak bubbles without the wavy mess
hit registration also seems much more reliable.and BIG fps boosts ofcourse.

The only thing that ultra offers is render distance,
because there is currently no way to play potato mode and have players render at the speed and distances that they do on ultra.
Play A2G and you'll notice this massive difference, no matter if you set render distance to max,
on potato mode if you try a strafing run you'll be pretty much in their face before the players magically appear.

So yup I agree, the graphics could use work, they should bring back physx while they're at it,
because the game looked better back in 2015 on my mid range potato PC
than it does today in 2020 on my top of the line Corsair i164...

One time it was actually to my slight benefit to have shadows on because I once saw the shadow of a guy before he had revealed himself to me. One single time in all of 7 years. You would think that seeing shadows could help you detect your enemies but not in PS2 since only the sun has shadows enabled and most fighting is indoors.

Yeah and don't forget about head shot damage. You know what graphics settings makes that super easy to hit...
Shadows off (with ambient occlusion) is like some visual advance cheat.

Doesn't it say CPU?
Doesn't CPU get busy when it has to load a lot of things? Tell me what's your fps when you're outside of battle with shadows on.

My fps is locked to 35 so i can shoot as fast as other characters at least in small fights (your rate of fire depends on your fps, fast firing weapons suffer more) Launching game takes ~4 mins, so this is too much effort really. I tell you what with DX11 devs force particles to "cannot be disabled"
ParticleLOD=0
ParticleDistanceScale=0.000000
are ignored in useroptions.ini

After that change i had to scale down my resolution from 1280x1024 to 1024x768 and render distance from 400m to 250m
Now i can see projectiles and beacon beams render for me (before i had to find them by their noise), but i am not so happy about that.

I think the shadows are cast by realtime lights, so turning off particular shadows would be very difficult. They could bake the shadows into the textures (baked lighting), but the shadows would be static only. Performance wise would be like having shadows off but the shadows wouldn't look as good as current ones. It may also be a lot of work to bake shadows on such huge maps, and they would require baking each time a building or terrain is moved or edited.