Realistically, this just depends on your artistic needs for the game and what you’re willing to live with. Mobile doesn’t have the luxury of being as tweakable with scalability settings on the fly as a PC game would.
If you’re targeting a wide-range of devices I would say that you need to find a cutoff for what is acceptable for your game based on the lighting, overall art quality (textures, models, effects, etc), and the type of gameplay needed. If these things will directly impact the gameplay mechanics then I’d say target mid-higher end devices, whereas if it were something like a Match3 game you could target a wider range since lower quality wouldn’t directly impact gameplay.
Like with any generation of devices (phones, pc GPUs, consoles) there needs to be a point where you focus on future proofing your game or developing for the market that will be in place when it’s finished instead. Sacrificing quality features is sometimes more detrimental IMO, though.
Dynamic shadows are the absence of light by masking out shadow casters. This is why dynamic lighting has darkened areas.
Modulated shadows use this mask and give you an RGB color range to adjust the masked area for shadowing. It’s not as accurate as dynamic shadowing, but you have more artistic control and it’s cheaper to use!
Awesome! Thanks for your insights on development and explaining about the shadow I was seeing. However, there is one thing I still find confusing:
I have the directional light set to “Stationary”, modulated shadow is OFF, CSM StationaryLight Shadow Distance is 2000, Cascade is 1; the “Receive Combined Static and CSM Shadows” box is OFF on both the moving cylinder and the floor plane, and yet I’m still seeing a shadow. Why is this? In the Use Cascaded Shadows documentation, it shows a video where certain objects do not receive a shadow, yet I can’t achieve this effect in the test project you provided. Is there some setting I’m overlooking?
Thanks so much, Tim! Your explanations have been really helpful.
Thanks for clarifying about LDR. At least I know the look wasn’t a bug. I think though, I did potentially find a bug where the LDR blown-out look doesn’t “kick in” in the Editor even when Mobile HDR is disabled, until you also disable “Enable Combined Static and CSM Shadowing” from the project properties.
I guess the last thing I would humbly ask for your insight on is this:
If one decided to go with LDR (by having Mobile HDR disabled), would you still gain a large amount of performance, despite the fact that you would now be dealing with dynamic shadows instead of modulated? Also, would the performance benefits of CSM still fully apply in LDR?
EDIT: I just discovered that LDR will display correctly in the Editor, even with “Enable Combined Static and CSM Shadowing” ON in the project properties. That’s strange… perhaps it was a temporary glitch or I incorrectly interpreted what was going on. Sorry about that, Tim! That seems to be working good now.
P.S. My apologies if I asked one too many questions today, Tim. You’ve been very gracious to answer my inquiries. Thanks, and feel free to set this thread back to answered status. Have a good evening!
Feel free to shoot me a PM on the forums. I’m happy to continue the discussion, but it may be a few days before I get back to you as I’m out for the next week. Maybe a little less.
Why dynamic point lights are working and not spotlight? Is it more hard to program than point lights?
I don’t need shadows, it would be a performance killer, but for game taking place in a modern environment, spotlight would be more usefull (flashlight, car lights, etc.)
I don’t understand why each new updates brings new things that will be used in something like 1% of games and not having such basic features. Unity has spotlights working on mobile since many years…