PointLightBuffer

A light has a size, and a highlight has to know it. The shading treated every source as a mathematical point, so its reflection in a polished surface was a point too: smaller than a fragment, landing in some pixels and not their neighbours. That is the bright speckle a dark glossy model shows under a close lamp, and it cannot be filtered away afterwards because the information was never sampled. A real emitter subtends an angle, and a headlight a few centimetres from a wing subtends a very large one.

sourceRadius already said this and only the shadow pass was listening, which is why the penumbra was right and the highlight was not.

Reported from outside, and it turned an afternoon into a glance. A scene was submitting 63 lights against a budget of 10, so the whole budget went to static scenery between 7 and 23 metres away and the rig that answered the music never got a slot. Nothing flickered and nothing warned, because the selection did exactly what it documents; the symptom reported by a person was "the lights are poor", which leads nobody to a light budget. The count had to be recovered by walking the array in a console.

Reading it costs nothing and it is the only figure that makes the ratio visible: 63 offered and 10 bound is a scene to prune, 12 offered and 10 bound is a scene that is fine.

Deliberately not folded into colors. Most of the shading is a colour multiply and would not care, but the emissive term is not — a lit inlay is dimmed by whichever lamp shadows it hardest, regardless of that lamp's colour, so a light arriving at zero brightness would still switch a shadow onto the start line. The weight has to reach the shader as itself.

Filled for every slot rather than only for spots, because a slot keeps whatever the last light to hold it wrote — and a stale direction on a light that is now a point is a cone pointing somewhere it was never aimed.

Before the shadow pool every light owned a permanent cubemap, so being chosen for shading meant the shadow was already correct. Borrowed maps broke that: joining the set meant evicting somebody and baking six faces at two a frame. The pool has always had four slots more than the shader can bind; these are the lights they are for, kept baked before they are wanted.