Possible lantern bug?

[Guilleneve]

While placing new lanterns, some of the previously placed seem to be affected, even without placing the next one, only by moving it around. Sometimes with their surrounding light disappearing and others just directly turning off (of course, I tested this at night and using the time lock).

Anyone else with this problem?

[Denashi]

For performance reasons, there's a limit on the number of light sources in the game. It might get bumped up at a later date.

[alan.d.waddington]

This is a known limitation that occurs when you place a lot of lanterns. The developers replied to an earlier thread on this subject citing performance issues with too many light sources.

My understanding at that time was that if you placed more lanterns then a specific limit, then the earliest placed lanterns went dark. However, what I have seen, is that earlier lanterns still show up as white (or other colour when specified), but are not rendered as a light emitter, so you don't get a glow.

Rendering that glow quickly depends on how many light sources your GPU can handle simultaneously in a single pass. Older GPUs couldn't do that many, but I could still see it with on my 4080 mobile after placing about 30 to 40 lanterns.

When a game has fixed scenery, the developers can optimise the game so that only a few light emitters are present within the render distance at any given position within the game. This gets harder in open world games where you can see a long way and usually the light source attribute of distant light sources is switched off. This starts to become noticeable in games where flying is possible, such as flight simulators at night.

The problem in Tiny Glade, is that the number of light sources simultaneously visible is a function of player design, rather than developer design, which gives the developer very little scope for optimisation. Even light sources outside the viewing frustrum or occluded by other objects, can reflect off objects in view.

I think the best we can hope for is that sometime in the future, the developers sort the light sources by distance from the camera, and prioritise rendering the closest ones as light sources. Top down aerial views will still be poor, and it might be necessary to disable the 'glow' from all distant light sources to void this popping in and out as the camera is moved.