First off, thanks go to Dan for suggesting that I experiment with using flat shaded level surfaces. This is turning out to be a pretty huge breakthrough for the title. I've been playing around, and I'm now an official convert.....and to think I almost didn't do it.

I've set every level surface to FLAT. Combining this with face by face tweaking of albedo/ambient values and combining all of this with material scripting and dynamic lightsources is producing beautiful things.

You have almost complete control on how the actual level will behave in terms of shading and best of all you can change most of it in realtime to suit your needs.

There are disadvantages, of course.

One is that I lose the nice precalculated lightmaps that have been associated with this title forever. It's a huge change of direction and recreating the effect of patches of light on a wall(from a setting sun or an exterior lightsource, for example) are going to be tricky if not impossible to pull off.

The other trouble spot is that light produced by dynamic sources isn't stopped by walls(or anything else). If it is shining on a wall and illuminating the floor...well...the floor on the other side of the wall is also going to have some light on it. Fortunetely, the backside of the lit wall will be shaded correctly. I've seen this occur in many commercial titles, so I suppose it is impossible to workaround, though if anyone knows one, please fill me in.

The advantages outweigh the disadvantages and I don't see myself returning to the way it was before.

Anyway, here's a sneak peek...keep in mind that this is simply a test shot and I haven't tweaked or finessed it in any way. I still haven't totally gotten the hang of everything and this level wouldn't have a light like that anyway: