Flat shadows stick out horizontally on hills

I have shadows set to flat and normally play in VR (Rift).

The shadows look fine when they're cast from buildings at ground level. However, when the shadow is from say a tree that's up a hill, it's quite obvious that the shadow is being "drawn" on the horizontal plane, and so can protrude out from the hill. Not the end of the world, but a bit "odd".

That's the downside of 'flat' shadows - they're not really being projected. 'Default' shadows overcome this but cost more fps.

I hope at some point all the terrain shadows are softened down a bit like in other sims *cough*IL-2*cough* and/or respond to anti-aliasing.

As Lixma pointed out, that's how they're designed to work, and that's why they're called "flat". A classic "it's not a bug, it's a feature" situation :D.

Makes sense. Thanks for confirming. Happy to live with "slightly odd".

It's not just Flat Shadows that do this though.

Flying with Shadows set to Medium and Terrain Shadows set to Default, I get the same effect with Shadows rendered at long range. When flying in the early morning or late at night, it's especially noticeable as the shadow LOD kicks in. Short range, higher quality shadows DO render correctly with the terrain, so you get the impression of the shadows rotating as you fly along a ridge line for example.

See the two images below. The difference is around 30 degrees which on a flat and static image doesn't seem like much, but in VR flying along it's massive and incredibly distracting

Here the highlighted area is just over 2 Km's away

Here it is just under 2 Km's away

Default (Dynamic) shadows are replaced by flat shadows from a certain range to help with the game performance. The higher the shadows quality the higher the distance of drawing dynamic shadows (and shadows resolution as well)