On Android. How many lights can you have in a Scene or the total game?

I’ve received an error message:
“Warning! Using more than 1 pixel lights on a mobile device may decrease performance severely. You can change the mobile quality settings in ‘Project Settings → Quality Settings’.”

Can you have one point light per scene or is it one point light for the entire game made up of multiple scenes?

My game has one point light per scene and it’s not the greatest performance and my quality settings are set to “good”. I’m trying to increase performance. I’m getting some jerky motion during game play.

Any suggestions? Thanx guys

T-Roy,

What this message is referring to is lighting quality, and you can read more here.

The relevant part is:

Render Mode Importance of this light. This can affect lighting fidelity and performance, see Performance Considerations below. Options include:

Auto The rendering method is determined at runtime depending on the brightness of nearby lights and current Quality Settings for desktop build target.

Important This light is always rendered at per-pixel quality. Use this for very important effects only (e.g. headlights of a player’s car).

Not Important This light is always rendered in a faster, vertex/object light mode.

Have you adjusted the render mode of your light? If not, you could try lowering the importance from Auto to Not Important. I haven’t worked much in mobile myself, so I can’t speak much to your specific issues, but I’m not aware of any hard limits on the number of lights per scene. And just FYI, lights in scenes that aren’t loaded will have no effect on render performace, and neither will lights that are turned off. Also, you could check other light settings - are you casting shadows, how far is your light’s range set, etc. Lights are notoriously expensive, so you want to be careful with them.

You can achieve a lot of improvement by baking lights into a lightmap. Check it out here.