Poor performance, Lighting Issues + Inexperienced

Hi,

I’ve been developing a dynamic space game for a while now and have recently come to a point where ships are randomly generated in my game at runtime from different parts. Similar to parts in Kerbal Space Program, however with internal structure to them.

My issue is the fact I’ve used default point lights to light these parts as the light needs to affect all other parts in the ship. Spot lights didnt work because of shadow artifact and then just looked terrible.

Is there a solution to this? I can’t think of one and I thought about pre baking the lighting for each part but then how would it deal, for example with the lights going off or turning red when low on power. Also when access panels open, wouldn’t the inside still be unlit?, same with doors.

I’ve got a screenshot here and I’ve annotated it to help. Please keep in mind I plan on making large, i mean large, spaceships which will have a ton of lighting. So its important I tackle this now, early on.

Thanks, Alex

dynamic lighting is heavy on resources, such drops in fps are kinda normal. You should look into baked lights…

I dont think that point lights are the problem here, just took a scene that I had created, and duplicated 5 point lights with different colours, and then duplicated those until I had 105 point lights. There was little effect on my FPS with no shadows on the point lights, with shadows enabled on all the point lights, the fps was havled, but still stayed above 150 fps.

Run the scene without the point lights and ensure that it is the point lights that are causing the problem here, and not anything else.I suspect something else might be an issue, try running the profiler.

Also keep in mind that with real time point lights, that the light goes through geometry onto other geometry.

Thanks to you for guiding me. The thing is. When you’ve used unity for a while you end up searching to deep into what could be causing an issue when its rather trivial.

The idea of disabling shadows would look awful in most cases. But. On distant point lights this could be done. :slight_smile:

Solution: Lower Graphics Settings and Optimise what lights are being displayed.