@Frank_G - look forward to seeing your site. There are a few good sites but always room for more. If everyone added useful content to the Wiki or Acknex that would also be good. Lots of stuff buried in these forums.

@oliver2s - might it be possible to create a simple fake radiosity for terrains like the terrain shadows from the Wiki? What I mean is in your editor allow setting a value for each textures say like "light_reflectiveness" "light_absorption" then from the angle of the sun create a directional blur on each texture on the terrain with the "light_reflectiveness" indicating how much of a blur to apply. So a dull rock texture might have low "light_reflectiveness" and you blur it less, a metal object might have a high "light_reflectiveness" and you create a bigger blur. Then this blur layer can be blended with the terrain depending on the "light_absorption" of the textures and cast like the shadow example.

I'm not a programmer so not sure if I am explaining it right but see this mockup.



Pretend the blue ball is a 'shiny' texture and the 'red' less shiny. Your blur for each texture is more or less depending on how shiney it is, then it basically creates a colored shadow like the terrain shadow example which you blend with overlay or perhaps hard light to the current terrain. Maybe it is not accurate but might give a little fake radiosity without heavy calculations?

Anyway just a thought, not sure if it is useful or you are scratching your head now "huh?"