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Anno 1800: Shadows of Beauty
While playing Anno 1800, I noticed something which I’ve never noticed before in any other game (but to be fair, I don’t play too many city builders): The sun keeps a position relative to the camera and thus the shadows always fall from left to right: It almost looks like a time-lapse of a sun moving across the sky, only that here it happens because I rotate the camera. For comparison: There is an option, which makes the sun stay at a fixed world position: Now it behaves as we know it from the real world: As the latter option is more realistic, it must be the better choice, right? Well, not from a compositional point of view.
For comparison: There is an option, which makes the sun stay at a fixed world position: With the shadows “hiding” behind the buildings, it almost looks like “unlit” mode from your favorite game engine: big shoutout, that the Anno team implemented an automated camera rotation for nice video capturing (F3) and also a way to hide the UI (ctrl+g).
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