I noticed an odd light occurence at night walking around in cities. When I approach a lighted area the shadows will pop to a darker shade when I get close enough. They will then stay this way. It is like it is loading some kind of updated shadow setting when I get close enough to a new lighted area. The effect is kind of jarring and I was wondering what could be causing this?

http://youtu.be/aLLvF6t52lM

Thanks!

Add this under [General] in your Skyrim.ini My Docs > My Games > Skyrim

fFlickeringLightDistance=8192

If you have any performance issues then try 4096

Edit...

Just guessing that it's the problem I had cos your video hasn't been processed yet.

Video is up now. Thanks for help, I'll try that.

Yep. That is what was happening in my game. The above fix took care of it.

Yeah, good call! That was totally it, it was loading the light flickering data but it was happening way too close. I looked at the default which is 1024, setting it to 4096 pushed it plenty far away not to be noticeable, even 2048 helped a good bit. No fps drop. Thanks for the help!!

No worries. For me it was one of those things that justs pokes you in the eye and breaks the immersion!

I started a thread about this a long time ago: http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1333843-light-flickerpop-up-issue/page__p__20077991__hl__light%20flicker%20pop%20up__fromsearch__1#entry20077991
It was bothering me too and it's something that everyone is experiencing in Skyrim, but no one is talking about. I find that strange.

Paingiver said the right setting.
But be aware that lights are now much darker, because the distance of the lights are much longer.

huh. This bothered me once, but I had tossed it up to the list of Things That Can't Be Helped in Skyrim, and it didn't bother me after that. Then I read this thread and it bothered me again. Then that fix worked and it bothers me no more. Good one!

Wait wait...
I found a much better solution. Why increase the light distance, why not DECREASE it?

Under [General] section in your Skyrim.ini, put fFlickeringLightDistance=2.0000.

The result is much better. We now have bright lights (looks very nice), and no pop-in / light change AT ALL. Why? Because we just decreased the light distance value to such an extremely small number that we would have to be a millimeter away from the light source to see it change. I thought the opposite way when I first discovered this setting. We should decrease it, not increase it! Increasing it would greatly prolong the llight flicker/pop-in as well, but then it resulted in very dark lights; that gave you two positives and one negative.

Totally recommend EVERYONE to do this. It adds no performance hit, gets rid of the light flicker/pop-in and makes the lights look better because they're now always bright. Three positives, none known negatives.

does it make it so that candles cant flicker?...what does it actually control?

Darn, I found a negative. Having fFlickeringLightDistance=2.0000 does remove the light flicker from light sources. I mean, light sources still "flicker with light", but it doesn't affect other objects.
3 positives, 1 negative then.

However, this can also be positive itself, because also means that jagged shadows won't "crawl" near light sources, because the flicker does not affect other objects.

My personal and final recommendation is therefore: put fFlickeringLightDistance=4096.0000 and have a weather mod (once the CK is out) to change HDR settings that makes light look stronger/brighter.

Fiddling around with the fFlickeringLightDistance setting changes the distance when you see this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLLvF6t52lM&feature=youtu.be
Default value is 1024. You have to add the setting in Skyrim.ini under the [General] section.

Having a higher fFlickeringLightDistance (for instance 4096 and higher), it means that this light flicker distance is much longer, so you won't see it pop-up close to you. This also causes lights to be darker though, because there is never a light flicker change. No performance hit. That's 2 positives and 1 negative. It will be possible to make lights stronger by tweaking HDR settings though once the CK comes out.

Having a very low fFlickeringLightDistance (for instance 2), it means that this light flicker distance is much shorter, so you'll never see a pop-up at all. This also causes lights to be brighter (which looks nicer), because the light flicker has never changed to the darker version of it, because the distance is so short. However, since this makes the light flicker distance so short you'll never notice it, this also removes the light flicker from light sources in terms how they affect other objects (like how the light of a fireplace flickers on other nearby objects). No performance hit from what I could tell. 3 positives and 1 negative.

Pick a choice which path you want to go. There are different positives and negatives of each one. I'm personally choosing the path of the higher fFlickeringLightDistance.
One thing is for sure though, having the default number of fFlickeringLightDistance is a bad idea, unless you like constant light pop-ups 10 meters ahead of you.

Yeah, just played with various distances but as soon as you get the flickering effect to show up, the old problem reappears! Gone back to 8192.

I don't mind the slightly darker look, I thought the lights were a bit bright to begin with so I'm going with 4096.