Shadows in BA2

[Borg]

Hi all. I see that shadows in BA2 has three different settings. Off, normal & high.
Being an owner of an iPad Air - I thought I could push the shadow limit to high... But it lags (a bit but noticeable) vs. normal. Will this be improved or ?
Thanks!

[pipfromslitherine]

It's all a tradeoff. The shadows (and rendering in general) are already heavily optimised. Unfortunately the iPad Air's hardware has been tuned in such as way as to be faster in almost all ways other than processing polygons. Not sure why Apple chose that route, perhaps most games use only a small polygon count, but BA, with lots of objects and unit, pushed the hardware very hard. And rendering shadows requires (obviously) nearly 2x the number of polygons to show.

Cheers

Pip

[Tac2i]

I just turned off shadows on my aging Windows laptop and BA2 performance very noticeably improved. Thanks for the tip.

[Borg]

Thanks very much Pip ! So... Just curious, in future patches to BA2, would it be remotely possible for performance to improve ? Just saying & no bad feelings intended. BA2 is remarkably exciting !
There aren't shadows in BA1 for ios correct ?

[pipfromslitherine]

Never say never, but major performance improvements are unlikely. We are already pushing the hardware very hard. I'm sure Apple has a good reason for their premium product have about 50% the polygon throughput of the 'normal' iPads but it definitely hurts games like ours.

BA1 did not have shadows at all, that is true. We wanted to allow for the better visuals, but gave the option to the player as to how much performance they were willing to pay for it.

Cheers

Pip