by Nadnerb » Fri Jul 04, 2008 9:54 pm
Yes, the 8 realtime (vertex) light limitation is the same for OpenGL and DirectX. It is a hardware/driver/API limitation, and not the fault of any particular engine. Also note that a total of 8 lights affecting a single face is MORE than sufficient in pretty much all cases. (Actually, the max light limit is implementation dependent, and may vary between various drivers)
Plasma happens to handle this rather well by applying the closest of the attached lights to any given object. (objects in plasma must have references to every light that will affect them, unreferenced lights only affect the avatar.) PyPRP automatically attaches all lights to all non-shadless objects by default, but lightgroups can (and should) be used for greater control.
Also, stop freaking out, go back and read what I said again. You are not limited to 8 (or whatever the specific limit is) working lights per age, each object can be affected by a different set of 8 lights, so the total number of lights in an age is pretty much unlimited.