#shadows

At single-digit sun elevation a street canyon gets no direct ground light, so nothing on the ground casts a visible shadow while the cascade is billed in full; fix it with sun azimuth, not renderer flags.

On current builds a PointLight created with Shadows = true contributes nothing to the frame: no light, no shadow, silently. The six-face cubemap shadow path is broken while SpotLight's single-view path works. For a directional lamp, cast with a downward SpotLight instead.

A SkinnedModelRenderer has no live SceneObject until the renderer first goes live. A Flags.CastShadows write at spawn time lands before the SceneObject exists, so it silently no-ops with no error and no warning. NPCs spawned with a shadow toggle off keep casting shadows anyway. Do not trust the write: read back the state that actually landed and retry on a staggered sweep across the following frames until the read-back matches the value you asked for.

The engine ships its own render quality profiles, backed by real convars, that CAP what your scene asked for. A scene authoring 4 shadow cascades renders 2 for a Low-shadow player. And post-processing (AO, DOF, bloom, tonemapping, SSR) is opt-in per camera: none of it runs until the game adds the component, so a code-created camera renders flat, ungraded, and un-occluded no matter how well the lights are authored.