But here’s the thing: I didn’t create a new light group called cube group - I just selected cube group (which already existed) and added it to the light linking.
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You probably dragged the collection onto the name of the group instead of into the grey square thing.
You get this warning (but yes easy to miss and goes away quickly)
I have found that sometimes Blender fails to rename it automatically.
This one implies that if you try hard enough it will force the use of the same name 
Maybe time for Bat droppings thread!
Addendum: this bizarre behavior is completely expected and desired. Report has been closed per
Yes, they actually intend for the feature to be this stupid.
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I’ve never done it that way and I’ve never seen any recommendations.
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/cycles/object_settings/light_linking.html
The truth is that because of the way it is written in the manual, it is very easily lost and is left as “if you want, do it like this” rather than “this is the workflow with which this feature was designed in mind”.
For now I only have to learn this way because I can’t even compare it with the Maya implementation, there that thing works badly and worse every time I use it.
I’m currently using Blender 4.0 for a film project, and was disappointed with NPR test results in EEVEE Next in 4.2, which made me sad. I’d been looking forward to it.
I’ve been very curious about GooEngine, but have held off because it doesn’t support Apple silicon, and I’m wary about using a fork for potentially large multi-month or ongoing projects for compatibility’s sake.
Has anyone here used it and had any experience using it?
I use Goo Engine, exclusively. Which does mean I’m currently “stuck” at Blender 4.1, as the arrival of Eevee Next has thrown a wrench in things. Where GE is going to be moving in the future, remains to be seen… they’ve indicated there’s some sort of future plan, but not the details of it.
In terms of running on Silicon - as you’ve noted, currently it does not. Goo is working on getting this to happen, but it required them getting (another) Mac to develop it there. (Sadly, they’d bought an Intel Mac in the past year or so just to support Mac development of the engine… i hope it wasn’t too much of a waste of money.)
So - no ETA on the silicon version, but it’s in progress.
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I really do like the results I’m seeing from Goo Engine. I mean Dillon and team are doing some phenomenal work over there. Huge inspiration! Too bad about the lack of Apple silicon, though. I’d be happy to test it if and when it happens. (I do have an Intel Mac as well, but my M1 Max laptop basically spanks it in Blender. Right now I run the two in tandem when I’m actively animating and rendering projects.)
My real wish is that somehow the work on GE could be integrated into the main Blender project, but that’s probably too much to ask. Anyway, I guess only time will tell. I appear to be stuck in 4.0 for the time being, since my current film project is stable on it. I’ll see where things land when I finish it next summer…
P.S. Are you on the Goo Discord? I think I recognize that user icon!
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Yes, tis me. 
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I believe some work has started to bring some stuff. Isn’t Lateasusual one of the GE devs? They brought Light/Shadow Linking recently, if I’m not mistaken. Other stuff would require more effort, from what I’ve seen.
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nah Mac isnt really good for 3d graphics work, specially because their platform makes it more difficult to maintain than windows or linux, and other graphical limitations. In the other hand also linux is not the favorite of certain big software companies that likely we will never see a linux version from their most used software…
Goo engine seems safe to use, since it is in active development and maintainance…
Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS, AmigaOS, …
Just use whatever OS works for you and appreciate that others work with what works best for them.
Tribalism is old hat. My X is better than your Y.
Tiresome.
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So, is it just normal that every new version (or build) of Blender will have a one-time, minute-long freeze when first switching the engine to EEVEE? Because that’s what I’ve been getting since 4.2.
At first I thought it was a bug, but now it’s still here and happening every time I download a new beta build of 4.3. I think it also happened when I updated my drivers, so is this some shader compilation thing?
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Yes, that’s normal. Opening a new build for the first time has a rather long waiting process while Blender builds all the shader framework in the background.
You might also notice a longer shader compilation time when opening a scene for the first time, for 4.2 compared to to 4.1. And, longer delays between editing a shader and seeing it update.
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The eevee rewrite in 4.2 added a lot of features, so shader compilation was impacted. There’s an setting to add more threads to maybe speed it up (Max Shader Compilation Subprocesses), but in general 4.2 is slower in that regard, at least in my experience.
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It would be nice if there was a more obvious notice to the user about what it was doing. It’s easy to think that it just crashed. I don’t mind the wait if I know.
It has a small notice in the top left if you have overlays turned on but it’s easy to miss.
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Totally agree. I’d love a centered dialog box informing the user.
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One thing I heard mentioned is that if you have an Nvidia card you can set the shader cache size. If you have plenty of storage space you can set it high which supposedly prevents shaders from having to rebuild if the cache size is too low.
I just set it high and left it so not sure how much difference it makes. It won’t help the first time they have to compile but later maybe.
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Oh! Thank you for this! Very good news indeed to see NPR-specific projects in the works.
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