Because I am tired of other players’ condos wrecking my framerate because they have zero understanding the implications of having dynamic shadows on all light sources
I think that using lights that cast shadows is a pretty nice thing to make environments more realistic, so you probably shouldn’t have a problem with the players making use of an feature given to them, as much as the optimization of these shadows. If you have decent and fairly recent hardware and those create lag, it’s most likely to be some sort of code optimization issue. I’m no game dev expert but it sounds weird that shadow casting is this resource intensive, unless it’s got something to do with how Unreal Engine 4 itself handles lighting and shadows.
I’m pretty sure it’s very much normal for real-time shadow casting on lights to have a high impact on performance in pretty much any game engine, especially if you have more than a couple lights with it enabled. The issue is that people don’t even see the lights casting shadows by default since it’s a graphics option you have to enable, so most people aren’t deliberately using this feature, it’s just enabled on lights by default and causes most condos to run terribly for anyone who has the graphics setting enabled.
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Thank you for the explanation, that definitely helps me understand this better. I only wonder if there would be any way at all to keep using this shadow casting feature for those that do want to use it? You can’t exactly tell who is going to visit your Condo and if they have a good (meaning powerful) machine to handle it or not if the Condo is set to Public mode where anyone can visit it.
If you still want to have/use Cast Shadows, the implication is that you enable it for each newly placed light source, instead of it being selected by default all of the time, and imo it should be overriden entirely on the client’s end by the Placeable Light Shadows toggle in the Graphics settings
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Okay, that makes sense. Thank you. I can see where you are coming from better now, so I think I might as well give this suggestion a vote.