So there are definitely a BUNCH of known bugs in the local lighting code. Unfortunately, I'm not going to make any promises about when they're going to get fixed.
A brief history:
I guess this shouldn't have been too much of a shock, but people have been using WAY more lights than we expected them to be.
Unfortunately, it will require some redesign of our lighting system to correctly handle the higher number of lights quickly - we were rushed for time, and tried to cheat a bit on implementation and design, and got punished for it.
Since our baseline frame rate was already pretty low, we decided that the best thing to do would be to turn off the lighting system by default - it was one of the easiest ways to improve our frame rate.
Since most of the work that we've been trying to do has been to improve the experience for all users on all hardware, the reality is that fixing the bugs in an optional effect that we plan to redesign isn't too high right now.
We'll get around to working on the lighting system again at some point - it was really cool when it was working properly. And with the new cards coming out with much better vertex shaders and floating point color pipeline, hopefully we'll be able to do a much better job on it. There's ALL sorts of cool things that we've been thinking about doing. Of course, we'll try and make sure it works on lower-end hardware as well.
Some of our earlier beta users probably remember the earlier builds where you couldn't turn off lighting OR shadows - try it out someday, and enjoy the slide show.
But when they DO work, it's really cool.
- Doug
