I would like to see ALL lights in a scene cast shadows. It seems torches and candles don't, but I think it would add to the atmosphere if they did. Sometimes indoors you can be in a room with a candle and NO shadows are cast.

That would be nice, but you have to think about the overall game performance. Shadows for everything is really demanding, and even with that, most shadows are just approximations and don't reflect on real light with light particles bouncing all over the place and affecting other shadows and so forth. So if you want all shadows on, your computer would have a heart attack orgism.

that's...why this would be a mod. people who can run it can download it and run it and people who can't don't have to. cool.

i would dig this. shadows do a TON to add to a scene and it's weird seeing some light sources cast shadows and some not cast any. i'm sure this is pretty much as simple as going through all the light sources in the game and clicking an "enable shadows" checkbox so it's really more a matter of it being tedious to do than it being particularly hard.

do equipped torches cast shadows? there was an ini option in Oblivion and Fallout that made it so your equipped light sources would make NPCs cast shadows and i assume the same would apply for static objects in Skyrim, and if it's not in the game by default then adding the ini value might work, going by how well adding other ini values from past games works.

I second this motion. One of the first thing that I noticed in Skyrim was that torches and candles don't cast shadows. Shadows are awesome so they should cast them!

+1

I already tried the ini setting... it didn't work for Skyrim. If the scenes are simple xml format, maybe a script could be written to update the light sources.

That's why this shouldn't be a mod. If every light source cast shadows, no matter what computer you have, it wall crap its pants and beg to be put down like a rabid animal.

*MEEEEK* ERROR! (bad joke )
It's actually much more complex, and it's a hard coded "feature", so only BS or SKSE in 4 or 5 years can achieve this. Shadows in this game are so badly implemented that increasing the shadow-casting light sources would probably bring a three way SLI rig to it's knees.
So you understand why, shadowmapping - the technique used here, generates a depth buffer from the perspective of the light, them projects it upon the scene and whatever doesn't superpose gets shadowed. This is nice because no matter hos many shadows a light source is casting, the tax on the system is the same. But with double the sources, double the tax... And here comes BS and Crappy Implementation Man *cheesy superhero theme song* ! I can't tell exactly what method BS is using, but judging by the FPS hit, the INI settings and how shadowmapping runs, I think they're rendering a 2048x2048 (or whatever your SMR is) frame from the light source's point of view every frame. So making those three candles, the torch you're holding and the six candles chandelier over your head to cast accurate shadows, means you're rendering the scene 11 times -10 for the shadows, at your SMR, and 1 for the final frame at your screen resolution- And that includes textures (so you can get those fancy leaves make accurate shadows on the wall) and the process of changing the bright overlay that's the result of the shadow scenes projected on the final scene ten times, which not only means to do it ten times, but also have it be a gray scale file, instead of a binary matrix. (and this last bit is WHY it's hardcoded)

This equals your framerate gets divided, roughly by factors between 12 and 15 in such a scene, depending on your card. (Low end cards would just crash and send you their lawyers for exploitation...)

WOHOO!! MATHS!!!

The Gamebryo renderer isn't that bad actually... and I'm not quite sure how Bethesda managed to [censored] it up in the way they did.

I'm not talking about the individual render And of course, this is speculation, but highly probable, AFAIK. Gamebryo's rasterizer (if they're using it, and I won't believe they're using a Rtracer, this is a rast, as geometry errors sow us) isn't bad at all. But you'd be using it 11 times per frame in that scene, plus some real-time texture-to mesh projections and gray scale editing. Any renderer used ten times per frame is bound to give you crappy FPS.