Is there any active project/attempt to increase the max number of visible lights in the game?

[Bottletopman]

As far as I know lighting and the engine is very intertwined/complex and thus modifying this is no mean feat, but has there been any progress so far or has it come to a dead end? Megaton could definitely do with more than what was it, three lights at a time? I'm guessing this would be something out of the scope of the JIP plugin?

[jlf65]

As the glowing ghouls mod shows, it's not a problem with the engine as it is with the graphics cards/drivers. At the time FO3 came out, most cards handled four or sometimes eight light sources in hardware. If you tried to add more light sources, the driver either ignored it, or it handled the light source in software. The former would cause lights to cut in and out, while the latter caused lights to slow the system to a slide show, depending on how powerful your computer was. Because of that, Bethesda designed the levels in FO3 so that (usually), no more than three lights were in one place at one time, allowing you to then use your Pipboy light in addition to the lights around you. There is nothing in the engine to prevent more lights, it's just that at the time, you would either cause existing lights to cut out or slow the display to a crawl, depending on how your video card/driver handled more light sources.

Modern cards and drivers should handle this better, so try the glowing ghoul mod and see how your system responds.

https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/55827

[Bottletopman]

ooooh right, come to think of it I think Megaton indeed had very few lights because of this. I always assumed Megaton being much brighter but it's probably because I ran a mod that gave it more lights. I've got a GTX 1060 with 6 GB of vram so I think I should be right, I do notice that lights tend to cut out on the edges of certain surfaces and I think multiple lights too close to each other will flicker as the camera is rotated/moved but if I recall correctly vanilla night time brightness is so bright in an attempt to mask that. I've got RWL for TTW which makes things a fair bit darker so it's much more noticeable.

[jlf65]

Yeah, ambient light (as it's called) tended to be fairly high in FO3 since "real" lighting was still pretty expensive. I liked the glowing ghouls mod, but my card at the time did more than four lights in software. That meant that when I ran that mod with MMM, I could easily wind up at .5 FPS when a bunch of night ghouls or ghoul dogs came into the area. Very cool looking, but totally impractical for game play. I really need to try it again now that I'm using an FX6300+1050Ti. I actually hadn't thought of this in several years because I never had the power to run it at a playable speed. I probably should have - I worked on the mod that made the shishkebab a light source you can use in the dark. When I did my TTW port of the light saber mod, that was also a part of it - light sabers being light sources.