I was gabbing about "happy accidents" over in another thread. I've been playing with combining Shaded lightmap map entities, dynamic lights, dynamically moving the sun around(but not using it as a sun), plus what I'm experimenting on in the flat world.

One thing I never realized is that the light emitted by the sun really operates on two levels. If you are standing on a lit up area(lightmap) then the model is shaded correctly(IF you use the appropriate material settings...without them it simply brights up the whole model as you would expect). If you're standing in a darker area, then it still gets shaded, though it is much much less(again, because of the use of materials overriding the value on the floor). By moving the sun around and not using it as a sun, you can fake radiosity on models, globally(or individually if you use alot of materials).

I've also been playing with dynamic lights and using them to fake radiosity. If you use the right combo of RGB, lightrange, and positioning it is pretty convincing. It takse some tweaking, but I've had nice results.

The only problem with dynamic lights is that I get some pretty major league banding...esp in the falloff zone. I don't know if that is an engine fluke or just the way these lights operate. I've never seen that effect in commercial games. Perhaps it has something to do with level textures being 16-bit as opposed to 24-bit.

Basically, it can be summed up like this(noobs should live by what I'm going to say)...learn to adapt and don't stick to the gameplan. In the last post I said I didn't see myself going back to the way it was before....before that, I could never see myself in a million years using flat shading in a major way. I've come up with this weird and wonderful hybrid style because I loosened the reigns and decided to take some chances. There's all kinds of "hidden" flexibility just waiting out there, and this is yet another reason why A6 is such a great tool for the little people.