I thought about putting one spell/ability with 4-5 ActiveMagicEffects per actor in current cell.

It gives 100 ActiveMagicEffects per cell (in crowded areas), assuming that theres 20 actors loaded (worst case scenario).

Usually there wouldnt be more than 1 per actor, because they would be conditioned.

ActiveMagicEffects would be scripted (nothing fancy, polling with VERY long update times + like 2-3 simple functions)

How much impact would it have on performance? Would something explode? Has anyone tried anything like that?

Think about it.

100 running scripts on 20 actors with 4-5 active effects.

My CPU would pack up and kick the heat sink off, dismount itself off the mobo and head out the door saying "I QUIT".

Ok if you DO condition it to be just 1 actor, that would be fine. But that's still alot of scripts(for one mod).

For what it's worth... Before SKSE, I had around 303 Active Magic Effects on the PC, with Global Checks because it was the only way to do what I wanted; whilst that's not the same as Scripts, obviously, the overall performance effect I noticed was nothing. Unfortunately, it's the Scripts that are the potential big issue...

Like Terra says, that many Scripts will probably cause an issue; but I'd wonder if you could maybe find a way to stagger them? If you could arrange it that each script ran it's update block only one at a time you'd probably reduce the overall effect massively... I'd *guess* from the long update time, you'd probably hit a situation where it everything is smooth, and then some potentially major stuttering if they all fire at once...

Yeah, the amount of ActiveMagicEffects won't really have a noticeable impact on performance, in my experience. I'm actually working on something right now that relies on a similar amount of AMEs. It seems to work fine for me without any noticeable performance drop as long as your scripts are very efficient or low-resource. It is really the burden of the scripts themselves that you will need to take into account more than the AMEs (which, if your scripts have very long update intervals, sounds like they're probably not going to be too much of a burden -- but I'd make sure you are careful to optimize them all as much as possible)

I forgot to mention that they would be mostly "inactive" scripts (RegisteredForUpdate and doing nothing, but the moment of registration on new cell load could be heavy I guess).

What I'm not sure about is, if even non scripted magic effects are causing any impact or are they totally unnoticable and the only thing I should care about is script overload?

@egocarib, how are you attaching your spells to that many actors? cloak? hardcoded? just curious