You wake up one morning as the all-powerful creator of your town in Cities Skylines 2, and you notice a flicker. You look closer, and this turns out to be a shadow flickering away in the sunlight. How does that happen? You wonder and frantically reach for the in-game settings to do a few tweaks. Multiple graphics changes later, there is no change at all. The shadow flickering issue continues. So, what can you do to fix it? That is where we come in. In this article, we are going to walk you through how to fix this issue in Cities Skylines 2 once and for all.
The shadow flickering issue is not something that is uncommon or has not been seen before. Many players assume it is a Unity engine limitation that has transferred over from Cities Skylines to the new game. Well, this is something that you can quite easily fix with the right workarounds. While it does not affect the gameplay at all, it is very jarring to look at and can get annoying pretty quickly.
Cities Skylines 2 (II) Shadow Flickering Issue: Is there any fix yet?
This is a glitch that is typically caused by improperly configured settings in your game. You can solve this by changing certain key settings of the in-game Settings menu. Here are the settings you should look into changing:
1). Anti-Aliasing
This particular setting uses your GPU hardware to scale and render still images. It also makes them less sharp and more cohesive with the textures of the game. It is also responsible for lighting and brightness, without which images and objects would look jagged and have straight lines and pixels. In order to solve the shadow flickering issue, you will have to enable a particular version of Anti-Aliasing. This is known as TAA. In order to apply this, follow the given steps:
- Go to the in-game Settings menu by clicking Options.
- Click on Graphics, head over to the Advanced tab, and find the Anti-Aliasing Method option.
- Now, switch to TAA.
Doing so should help with the flickering issue.
2). Turn on Constant Dynamic Resolution
This option can also be the reason why the shadow flickering effect is persistent in the game. Since most of the shadow flicker happens towards the edges of the screen (away from the central camera), turning this setting on can help fix that. To do so, head over to the Advanced tab of the Graphics settings, and find the Dynamic Resolution Scale Quality option. Next, select the Constant option from the drop-down menu.
3). Turn off the Day/Night cycle
This is another possible solution for this issue. If the issue is actually with the Unity engine, then it might be a computational issue. The in-game day/night cycle circles the sun around in a realistic way. This forces the engine to keep recomputing it and causes the shadow to flicker. A possible solution to this issue is turning off the day/night cycle so that the position of the sun is made constant. Doing so temporarily fixes the flickering issue.
Those are all the methods that you can use to fix the shadow flicker issue in Cities Skylines 2. If you found this article helpful and would like to see more content like this, make sure to visit Android Gram daily.
