Pretty much every game I've ever seen that has an outdoor environment, and tracks some sky lightsource for time of day and its shadows, does the same thing: Every X seconds or minutes, update the sun's position in the sky, and then rapidly transition all the shadows in the world to their new positions.
In every Skyrim or Fallout there's always a rash of guides about changing these parameters to try to get as close to real-time updates as your system can handle processing, because the janky once-every-minute shadow shift or whatever looks janky, jarring, unrealistic, and dare I mention Immersion? But seriously, it can be a distraction especially in actually dangerous games like Kenshi, where you end up literally jumping at shadows.
In Fallout 4 I realized chasing realtime updates and hammering your system for very little overall gain was not the way to go, and successfully tested a different method. Go the opposite route: instead of "update every 60 seconds and then rush the shadows to their new position in one second," I set my game to update Sun position every 10 minutes or so..... but then set the shadow-shift animation time to a duration of NINE minutes.
The result was an amazingly lifelike, realistic, super slow near-constant movement of shadows cast by the Day Star. There was never any sudden jerk of all the world's shadows to a new position. And no hammering your system for constant updates - one lunatic in Skyrim set his update time to 0.05 seconds or something insane.
I could never detect any additional load on my system from having the shadows moving, in effect, constantly. Processing their movement seems to be relatively low-impact - at least in Bethesda's engine.
So, and thanks for staying with me this far,
How does Unreal handle this sort of environmental effect? Would using this method also be low-impact in Kenshi 2? And while I'm making requests, would it be possible for Ogre to use similar settings and have this effect in Kenshi 1 now...?
Ultimately this depends on if any actual graphics experts could weigh in and let me know if this is in fact low-impact on a game, or if having the shadows creeping along would be as bad or worse than trying to hammer constant updates.
But if it isn't, then I think tbh all games should do it this way.... the current method of "check position, jump the shadows over, sleep 10" seems to be one of those cases where everyone does it that way because that's the way everyone does it. If i'm right about this, I'd love to spread this idea around
(Oh - and the reason i set the FO4 updates to two different times was to account for lag and imperfect FPS, so even if the user drops a few frames ..... and in fallout, they will lol.... and lags here and there, the shadows are still patiently waiting at the end of their journey for the next update ahead of time and don't have to jump over)