clipka wrote:

> How about automatically computing this from light brightness and 
> adc_bailout?

doing it automatically based on light intensity was my first
thought as well but then I found it difficult to place a limit
due to the problem Warp mentioned.  But I didn't consider
adc_bailout, that actually seems to fit quite well.

The two drawbacks with that might be

1. It is not so intuitive for the user to change the parameter
    "Adaptive Depth Control" for this as the fade cutoff doesn't
    affect tracing depth, and removing a fade light artefact with
    this parameter may slow down rendering more than necessary as
    other rays get traced further out as well.

2. It is less flexible. The cutoff distance has an easily
    predictable effect and could well be used for artistic
    purposes such as creating a strongly visible boundary
    on purpose (e.g. cartoon street lights). Also, in some
    situations it might be an alternative to using a light
    group (such as a lamp without fading illuminating a
    room but not distant objects outside the window).

But the approaches are not mutually exclusive: we could have
the default cutoff distance for each light source set based on
adc_bailout and intensity to speed up rendering without user
interaction. In case the user whishes to override this
behavior to work around some problem or for artistic
reasons the distance could still be set manually.

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