- ensure player transform sync is not gated by third-person so player shadow stays consistent
- hold shadow projection center during movement and snap once on stop to remove delayed catch-up
- smooth foliage caster transitions using blended phase-shifted UV samples
- tune foliage motion frequencies/amplitudes for less popping
- increase shadow map resolution to 2048 and retune terrain PCF texel scale
- increase global shadow strength from 0.62 to 0.68 for stronger, clearer shadows
- keep shadow projection center fixed while moving to remove per-frame projection churn flicker
- replace delayed post-move catch-up with immediate stop transition and idle smoothing
- rework foliage shadow caster motion to use blended phase-shifted UV samples for continuous position transitions
- reduce high-frequency foliage threshold popping by removing threshold warping path
- sharpen terrain receive filtering with tuned 5-tap PCF weights/offset for more detailed shadows
- raise shadow map resolution to 1536 and keep light-space texel snapping for stable sampling
- set shadows enabled by default and lower global shadow strength from 0.65 to 0.62
- keep foliage animation speed consistent between moving and idle at 80%
- SHADOW_MAP_SIZE 2048→1024: 4x fewer pixels rasterized in depth pass
- Replace 9-tap manual PCF loop with single hardware PCF tap in all 4 receiver
shaders (terrain.frag, wmo_renderer, m2_renderer, character_renderer).
GL_LINEAR + GL_COMPARE_REF_TO_TEXTURE already gives 2×2 bilinear PCF per
tap for free, so quality is maintained while doing 9x fewer texture fetches.
- Throttle shadow depth pass to every 2 frames; OpenGL depth texture persists
between frames so receivers always have a valid shadow map. 1-frame lag at
60 fps is invisible.
Drop specular lighting from terrain shader — ground materials (dirt, grass,
stone) are purely diffuse and specular highlights made them look plastic.
Replace Reinhard tonemapper with a shoulder-only compressor that is identity
below 0.9 and softly rolls off HDR values above, preserving scene contrast.
Replace hardcoded specular multipliers with uLightColor * uSpecularIntensity
uniforms in all 4 world shaders (terrain, WMO, M2, character), set HDR sun
color (1.5, 1.4, 1.3) and specular intensity 0.5 so highlights can exceed
1.0, and switch the post-process pass from passthrough to exposure-compensated
Reinhard (exposure=1.8) for soft highlight roll-off without clipping.
