Any plans on increasing the light culling mask limitation in deferred?

Unity Engine
1

Currently in deferred mode, you cannot exclude more than 4 layers in total from all lights in scenes. Is there any plans at Unity to change this limitation? Other game designers suggest this is a design flaw of the game engine.

This is a frustrating limitation, and I am constantly struggling to re-assign items to proper layers such that the limitation isn’t exceeded. The problem is magnified if layers need to be changed during runtime for physics/animation-related purposes. One little mistake and all lights become “broke” and you need to find what light/layer is causing the issue. In a large scenes with many real-time lights It is such a hassle, that I have decided to use forward rendering instead of deferred, so that light culling masks can no longer be a problem.

here is an interesting article:
http://gameangst.com/?p=167

2

I am currently able to exclude way more than 4 layers in deferred. Do you mean excluding more than 4 layers, all containing shader materials?

3

This is a pretty hardcoded limitation of how Unity’s deferred is setup.