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How many lights can Unity have at any one time?
Hi
I have a multiplayer game and I want each person to have a light which will flash on command, affecting surrounding models. How many of these will Unity let me have working at once?
You should be fine, unless you have over 100 people playing, or are planning on making it a mobile game.
Answer by Eric5h5 · May 04, 2013 at 07:01 PM
There's no limit. The quality settings have an entry for limiting the number of pixel lights, which you can change to whatever.
Answer by BobbleHead · May 04, 2013 at 07:03 PM
Open ended question there mate.
Fundamentally I've found in my experiences that lights cost; but they're effectiveness is dependent on the machine that's running the game, i.e graphics cards etc. I've yet to encounter a limit with lights, if that answers your question?
I guess this would depend on how many people were in game at any time, and what kind of light you're using. Unity does have a lot of handy lighting tips, if you check the docs.
How many people are going to be in game at one time? If there is 16 players, and inturn 16 lights attached then I think you'll be okay. But the rest of the level would need to be heavily optimised. I would suggest making use of vertex lighting, probably bake the scene too where possible.
Flashing lights will require code, that could slow down your game dependent on how you're going about it.
There's going to be upwards of 100 players at any one time. There could be times where they would all be close by meaning at least 100 perhaps probably 200 lights (if each has two) flashing.
Would there be a better solution to this ins$$anonymous$$d of using lights? I'm ideally looking to have a car model with two head lights which create light beams, two grill lights and two or more lights on a light bar. So realistically each player could have a $$anonymous$$imum of 6 lights.
Is there a better solution for this than using actual lights then?
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