Engine limit of four shadowcasting lights

[ghost]

Causes flickering (not super bad issue)

Deigue (from discord):

I had a thought to compare x,y,z co-ordinates and throw warnings if the min calc distance for 4 ~5 shadowcasting lights was hit , as a analyzer for light black crushing / glitches etc

[mrudat]

Lights don't need to be shadow-casting to cause flickering; there's a different issue with too many shadow-casting lights hitting the one location.

Too many shadow-casting lights will cause the engine to switch off all but the 4 closest shadow-casting lights; the problem with that is that it doesn't use a useful definition of closest; there are mods such as Just In Time Lighting (LE) or Just In Time - Remastered (SE) to allow the author to declare which lights should or should not be on based on the player's position.

[Noggog]

Gotcha, so you think #97 was not a dup? This one being the shadow-casting issue, and 97 being the non-shadow?

also, hopefully analyzers will be able to detect if JIT lighting and offer the suggestion as a "fix"

[mrudat]

Looking at the wording for both issues, they're both talking about the issue of too many non-shadow-casting lights illuminating the same object, as opposed to the distinct issue of too many shadow-casting lights near the player; you want at most the 3 nearest light sources to cast shadows, as the player may come with their own shadow-casting light (torch, candlelight).

Edit: Sigh, on more careful reading, they're talking about distinct issues. this issue is about shadow-casting lights, that issue is about too many lights illuminating a single mesh, for which SSE has an expensive (percentage fps hit) fix for at the engine level.