this isn't happening with all of my lights but its happening enough to be a bother. I have lights set up that seem to not render if the player is looking a certain way or is a certain distance away.

I took some screenshot of the problem and put them into this imgur album: http://imgur.com/a/SEqwf

Anyone else have this problem and know of a fix?

EDIT: Possibly found solution to this bug: http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1345955-lighting-going-buggy/page__view__findpost__p__20304753

bump? a new day, maybe fresh eyes to help with my annoying little light bug? id like to know the cause of this before lighting my interiors.

I have the same problem in my Dungeon...

I don't know the solution.. i want it too..

But it's good to know that i'm not the only one with this problem.. no ofense at all. xD

Try to pull the light FX out from the wall a bit. If it's in the wall it may be clipping, causing the wall to block it at certain angles.

I don't know if i did that.. i'll check..
then if i did that i'll try wah you said. ;D

Well I asked about this in another thread. If you have those lights set to Shadow Omnidirectional, they will not show more than 4 at a time. So if there are more in the direction you happen to be looking, or if you are in a certain radius of them, only 4 lights are going to show.

Nothing that can be done to change that, as it is right now. If said lights are only set to Omnidirectional, they -should- be showing up no matter what.

I'm having the same exact problem in my house project. I believe my lights are set to omnidirectional, but without shadows and I still have this problem. It is extremely frustrating. Your building looks really good btw, I like how its on the water!

Out of curiousity are either of you running any sort of injectors, like post processing or ENB Series?

I'm not running any injectors, my ol PC can't handle it I am using Realistic Lighting though, but I have that activated when using the Creation Kit so I can see what the lighting SHOULD look like in game (although it doesn't seem to work out the way I intend). I also don't see this problem in any other interior so RL shouldn't be the problem, otherwise it would (theoretically) apply to other light sources, not just mine.

I've the same issues, it seems it only render a certain number of lights, I solved a part of the problem by putting portals, but I don't think would solve for exterior cells.

I've been messing around and have noticed that its only affecting my main building, maybe it has to do with the set piece?

Im using peices from riften, including the riften Fishery exterior, the black briar meadery store front exterior (inside the city), and the riften warehouse.

the meadery (and associated set pieces i used to dress it up), as well as the Riften warehouse exterior are both totally unaffected by this bug, the only thing affected is the Riften Fishery Exterior set piece.

is anyone else using this piece? or what other pieces is it affecting? maybe we can look at the properties for each of them and look for the common attribute

Check your INI settings then... if nothing else make backups of your current ones and delete the originals from the Documents\Mygames\SKyrim folder. Then let skyrim load up with deafault ones. See if that changes anything at all.

The likely explaination is that your number of exterior lights setting is set ridiculously low.


Or it could be that set piece is bugged. Which is also VERY likely. There's still a lot of bugs... I would have prefered Bethesda to have been working on Creation Kit, rather than steam workshop. I could've been happy waiting for workshop.

Is this something you're running into with just multidirectional lights? This does seem to be happening a lot with many people. I've suggested room primatives and portals as well, as doing this solved my problems. Could some sort of global illumination be complicating things?

Alright, well I just noticed I was able to replicate the problem inside the actual Creation Kit. I even recorded a video (sorry, cell phone):

http://youtu.be/S5wG7Sh5ho0

If I double click on the light source (as in the video) I get the shadowing problem. I have the CK set to load only 5 grids and that particular room only has 3 lights (the room behind it has more, but I'm not sure how relative that is). Can somebody else see if this happens to them as well? If I reload/refresh the cell then the problem goes away, until I double click the light source.

Edit: If your curious that is a rug from Dragonsreach (under the Whiterun architecture category, its 'WRCastleRugEFree'). I'm also using the Black Briar lodge interior.

Did you try creating a room primitive? It doesn't matter if there is a wall in the way, the lights in your other rooms are still rendered. I have had major problems with the CK and lighting. For a while last night all of the lights wouldn't light at all until I restarted the program; I think there is a memory issue of some sort. I wish it could use more memory as a 64-bit app.

Fllow this to fully optimize your rooms: http://www.creationkit.com/Bethesda_Tutorial_Optimization

All is redered if you don't do this.

Well I just optimized my whole interior following the guide word for word and performance did drastically increase, but the lighting is still giving me headaches. It seems like in some areas it got better, but other areas the problem still persists. There's probably to many lights in the main room, I'd either need to split it up or do something else entirely. I suppose I will start a new house project as this one is slightly boring me. Its a pretty large one room interior (Black Briar Lodge) and probably isn't suited for a personal house.

I am also having this issue, Resorted to using a better lit Ambient Lighting for the cell and placing MUCH less. Cept I was only able to do this because mine was an interior cell.


Did that, Didnt work


Did that...


Problem still exists with both of those "Fixes"

Well when working with portals you have to take in account also the fact that in some areas you may be watching through more than 1 portal so it render also other rooms.

Its a tricky process to get it right and you have to think what the player will be seeing from all directions. To avoid problems with this I usually put a maximum of 2 lights every two rooms casting shadows, the rest I use no shadows ones to increase the light in some parts. For example I have a candle and a torch near it, I'll use the shadow light on the torch, while the candle will use a no shadow one.

Something I realised on closer reading of the Optimization article is that there's actually a very good way of debugging the number of lights you have:


The thing is that the problem isn't just the number of lights in a room, but it's also compounded by large objects - in the case of a large cave, or a large castle etc. you run the trouble of having one object receiving too many lights, which is the main part of the problem. The game doesn't actually care how many lights there are in a given room - merely how many lights each object is lit by (which are added up by the shader during the draw call). That would normally be a pain in the neck, but the debug shader actually works really well

Of course, don't forget that shadowed lights are a special case (I'm guessing there's only a fixed amount of buffers for drawing shadows, which get distributed amidst the visible shadowed omnis. Those you do actually need to hide, so you can't see more than four at a time.

Hope that helps!

this might explain my problem, my one Riften fishery piece was being lit by 8 separate lights. when i get back to my main computer i'll have to try and find a way to get optimal lighting of the area with much fewer lights

I alos have this... issue -.-

I've done some experimenting and i believe 9of9 is indeed correct.

I redid my lighting and my house, which is the exterior set piece for the Riften Fishery, now has 6 lights ? illuminating the object at once. With the 6 lights the problem has cleared up completely.

I added one more light for testing, and as soon as i did there were noticeable glitches as i originally saw and made this thread about.

I don't know if this is a hard number for all objects but i imagine its a safe bet, If you're lighting something that is one large object try to keep lights actually hitting the object down to 6

as per the wiki, http://www.creationkit.com/Bethesda_Tutorial_Lights_and_FX#Working_With_Lights LIBERALLY to make sure your lights count and are not lighting more than their target (in my case, the radius of a light from one of my adjacent buildings was hitting my main building and it was counting against the light count for the main building causing the bug)

Well, I had an issue with Omni lights that cast shadows. Apparently the game can only render at most 4 on screen at a time. So, I had to replace some of the lights with regular non shadow casting omnis. (They don't have the purple axis in the middle. If all you lights have a purple axis in the middle then they are shadow casting omnis and this is probably your problem.)

This post was a tremendous help to me. I was using that gigantic dwemer tower with the facade/opening on one side and getting this problem. I wasn't using any shadow-casting lights, but the lights would still flicker when I moved around. After I read the OP I deleted the big one-piece object and remade it piece-by-piece using the other parts available and that solved the problem. So consider this post a thanks and a bump so anyone else having this problem can find the solution.