MagicManICT wrote:Lighting is hard to render and there are many books on the matter... all at the $100+ mark. There is some information around the web on coding lighting systems, but its' pretty basic stuff and not much of a start on optimization... at least what I've read. Those that really know the shader systems are keeping it to themselves for several reasons, patents being one of the big ones.
I'm pretty sure that the basic ideas are available for free at least if you know where to look from... I'm pretty sure that many simultaneous light sources are quite computationally intensive to simulate so you have to do all kinds of workarounds for it to work properly (shadows, transparency comes to my mind first) and even then you may need a beefy computer to run it. Even in "quite recent" AAA+++ games like Witcher 3 I remember some lanterns magically turning on and off depending how far away you are from them.