Exterior Shadow Missing on First Load with Raytraced Shadows Disabled

Version: 1.6.34.0

Frequency: Consistently

Severity: High

Bug description:

A customer reported that the aircraft shadow is not visible in the exterior camera. After testing, this behavior was reproduced under specific conditions. If a flight is loaded while the graphics setting for raytraced shadows is turned off, the aircraft does not display a shadow in exterior view. However, if the user switches to another aircraft and then switches back, the shadow appears correctly even with the setting still disabled. This suggests the issue only occurs on the initial aircraft load.

When raytraced shadows are enabled, the shadow renders correctly in all cases. This may explain why the issue has not been widely reported. Testing with other aircraft shows they do not exhibit this behavior when raytraced shadows are turned off.

Several potential causes were investigated, including bounding boxes, configuration height, center of gravity pitch, and slew-related parameters, but none resolved the issue. The presence of legacy camera parameters such as shadow center was noted, though it is unlikely to be the root cause.

A copy of the current project has been shared with Flying Raccoon, who has access to the latest source files for further investigation. At this stage, the cause is unclear and may require deeper insight from the development team.

Hey @Flysimware,
The bug has been logged on our side.
It seems to be a problem of bounding sphere changing size based on whether the Shadow RTX graphics setting was enabled or not.

We’ll let you know when we have more information to share.

Best regards,
Romain

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