Chaos Axe question. Is a bug?

Hello ^^

Well, today I noticed a weird thing about the Chaos Axe.

Its the "shadow" of the weapon. Looks very strange, and not like the weapon does.

I better post a pic so you'll see what I mean:



I don't know if its a bug, or it was like that always, or its problem of my graphic card... dunno.

Can someone confirm this?


Any help to clarify this is appreciated. Thanks !

unless this happens to everyone whenever they equip one i suppose it's a prob/glitch with your graphics card. Try to update the driver if possible. might help.

Take another screenie without your shield and see what that looks like maybe? I don't know if what I'm looking at is the shield's shadow or the axe's shadow.

I think it looks better

Its like this for every one. The chaos axe is weird :P

The shadow is made from all the angry spirits in the UW/FOW!

someone have an chaos axe and can post a pic or confirm its look like that?

The storm bow has the same issue. You can see the lightning arcs on the storm bow, but the shadow shows 2 big rectangular blocks where the lightning arcs should be. Probably has to do with the way the shadow layer takes reference from the weapon's skin. The lightning on the storm bow only appears to be lightning because everything around it is set as transparent. But the shadow takes all information from the weapon skin and projects it as a shadow so what appears to be transparent on the weapon won't necessarily be transparent on the shadow.

Myself and multiple guildies have all seen this error when we have our bazookas.... err, I mean chaos axes.... equipped.

The reason the shadow is a 'box' is because the chaos axe is actually just a rectangular polygon with an alpha mapped (transparent) texture on it. The shadows in GW are created with just a basic 'shadow map' system. To get the accurate shadows would require either Ray-traced shadows (way too expensive), a special form of Stencil-shadows (again expensive), or a proxy shadow object.
All of which are more expensive than it's worth...

I got the samething with my Stormbow

agreed with frojack

althought my initial suspicion was that the object's shadow was not mapped... so the client displays the basic of an item, ie a box...

What makes them expensive to do? Is it the software needed or what?

Livingston

the more detail, the more expensive it is to do... for 1 item it's probably noting, but consider the great number of items... it can be quite resource consuming...

also, i remember last time i checked, you only see your shadow in detail, never other characters or npc's....

Same thing happens to me... don't have Guild Wars installed (Posting from my phone) so I can't check. But my shadows are on "LOW" detail.

Yeah I've noticed that problem long time ago.
I had post it in the Screenshot Exposition a few months ago.

Raytracing isn't expensive moneywise, but it is very, very, very, very... ...very, very, very expensive computation power wise. You'd spend half an hour rendering the lights for one single frame using raytracing, and that really isn't very smooth gaming experience.

That's the shadow of the bounding box for the bow/axe. It's probably no coincidence that the two weapons showing this effect have special skins with lighting effects.

Other things that use alpha transparencies:

Anything partly clear.
The spiky fins on your dragon mask
the teeth on your pumpkin mask
Any really skinny skinny weapons that have intricate shapes (butterfly/wingblade is one)

The special lighting effects are not applied to the shadows, so ya...its one of those "meh...we can overlook that" sort of deal, imo.

I get the same glitch with Chaos Axe.

You should write a book! Nice output.