But how do other Games\engines deal with it?
Lets take Doom 3 and a modernized Quake 1 Engine (Darkplaces and so on).
Both have with no doubt lightmaps, in Quake it was even the same way as
Gamestudio is still doing it. And Quake at least used levelblocks.
But both games are Normalmapped everywhere and all the time, even when no
dynamic lights are around. The lights can´t be all dynamic, because if they were,
then the static shadows would either not react to the dynamic light, because the shadowmaps must stay black despite of an nearby dynamic light, or the shadowmaps would become as lit as in my testlevel.
There is a third way, that comes in my mind. That there could be two different kinds of dynamic light. One Levelbound, for lighting up shaders and creating shadowmaps (but not affecting them), and one Entitybound, that can light up everything like always.
I hate talented people that are gifted to create great engines...... want too!
(but have not the time with children, thus why I want to keep things simple)