Maniaplanet Forum

By placing a lot of 4-6-1 and 4-6-2 as example you can easily force out the broken shadow calculation as shown in the picture below. You can see visible shadow edges between the blocks although there is no reason for a shadow to be there. These issues have been in the game for a couple of months already but I was able to consistently reproduce this issue today. I opened a new Map and placed only these two blocks. These Issues appear on my side with a display size of >2500 already, but the more I place the more visible this bug gets.


From my testing, the broken shadows seem to more easily occur in maps with high display sizes (especially the ones going over 10000). Custom Items with bad optimization seem to be able to cause this issue as well. Some blocks seem to be more affected by this issue than others (4-6-2 being the most obvious one). Nevertheless, once reaching a certain point, even normal road blocks such as 2-1-5 will be affected by the same issue.

Which shadow calculation setting did you use?
You should tell that as well!

With the high count of blocks you should perhaps use the ultra setting (needs to be set in the launcher first).

I've tried this with fast, default and high. If I recall correctly Ultra Shadow Calculation doesn't get embedded into the map anyways so there's no reason to try. Besides, I wouldn't call a display size of 2500 a "high count of blocks" as stated in my previous post. Completely ignoring the fact that it shouldn't even happen in the first place.

The ultra lightmap does not get saved with the map at its full resolution, this is true.
But it will still get better results than any other calculation with the resulting lightmap.
Of course ultra setting is only for the final touch.

And it depends a lot on the objects placed.

Compressed ultra light map that is embedded in the map is usually worse looking than high map.

That's bad, and actually against what Luckyboy once wrote in the lightmap discussion topic...
Perhaps you have wrong video card settings wrt that?

Ultra is bugged, and while maps calculated in ultra look great on the map creator's end anyone else who opens the map sees really crappy side effects.
I wasn't aware of this until people started asking why I made my maps look so weird. Found out about the bug from Eyebo who offered to (and did) recalculate all my maps on MX because every map I had uploaded was calculated in Ultra and looked like garbage to other players.
Real bummer, because I think Ultra calculated maps look awesome.
I really hope this issue gets resolved.