I have recently upgraded my project from 5.4.6f3 to 2017.4.30f1 and I am seeing an interesting glitch with the lights that only occurs in the new version. In my game we have machineguns that fire projectiles at a rate of about 1,000 rpm each. When many bullets are being fired, one or more of the lights in my scene seem to flicker off for a single frame randomly in correspondence with the machinegun fire. Sometimes the flickering even persists for a second or two after the guns have stopped firing. In total there are 5 static lights in the scene and the machinegun/bullets/flash do not make their own lightsources. Is UnityEngine cutting off some lights at its own discretion, or is this a bug? The game runs at 175f-205 fps on my machine so I cant imagine that Unity would be toggling the lights off for performance reasons. Any guesses are welcome, thanks!
My first guess is that Unity is reaching its pixel light count and reverting to vertex lighting. Have you tried either switching to deferred rendering, or increasing the maximum number of pixel lights in the quality settings?
We use deferred rendering in the project settings and also on our cameras. There are only a maximum of 6 lights in the scene and our max lights in the project graphics settings is also set to 6.
Definitely does sound more like a bug then. I’m not sure what else could be causing that.
I tried increasing the max project lights to 32 and setting all scene the lights to “Important” and it still happens. It must be a bug. I am using 2017.4.30f1 which is an LTS release. How can I make Unity aware of this issue?