Sorta reminds me of a bit brighter, less depressing STALKER

The STALKER series are a piece of art and a big inspiration, so that's a compliment
I just started replaying CoP, amusingly enough. Hearing that makes me excited
Also, nice to see it in motion with the video. Pretty much the only complaint I could level at it is the lod/foliage pop-in, but that's not exactly an uncommon issue, even in AAA-scope games.
Beyond that it all looks rather solid. Keep up the excellent work!
Not entirely @ Duion, but there were some changes that reduced the flickering effect.
The resource on this page should already be an improvement:
http://pastebin.com/LfqdCC0B
!!!
I decided to give this a whirl real fast:
Stock:
With the PCF filter:
That absolutely CRUSHES the ugly noise from the current method. You said Tom authored that? I need to ask about rolling that into stock.
I will note that I did tweak the shadowmap settings from what's stock in the default levels. They're, to be blunt, kinda insane. The shadows have 4 splits, reaching out to 400meters, meaning each 1024 map has to cover 100 meters of distance. It's no surprise that we see aggressive aliasing and peterpanning with that setup. I think I'll make a PR to dial back the shadows to a more 'normal' configuration like what I've got in my above test there that's closer to the distances we usually see shadows in play most games. That does a lot to deal with the aliasing and peter-panning, as said.
I'll have to take Andrewmac's vsm attempt and toss it in there too and see what happens. That worked pretty nicely in a broad sense, but had some blocky artifacting. I think getting PCF on there would smooth all that out and improve the shadows as a whole.
Anywho, rambling aside, thanks a bunch for bringing that bit to my attention
