1) Render the geometry albedo with a single directional light w/ shadow map to represent illuminating objects in the sky. The ambient lighting will be handled in this pass, whereby I can approximate the ambient light in terms of what is coming from the sky (sun, moon / stars, etc). The shadow map here will be very high resolution, and only recalculated occasionally.
2) I render a normal buffer, which will aid in the lighting passes, since each fragment will already have the appropriate normal after this step. I think this should be a nice optimisation, but I might skip it at first.
3) in several passes, I render up to 6 spotlights at once, adding up the results each time. By fiddling with its input params this shader can also render a single point light but with 6 shadow maps all to itself. I do this until there are less than 6 spotlights (or one point light) left over. Then, I use similar shaders optimised for 4, 2 or 1 light until all lights have been processed.
4) I combine the results of 1 and 3 and then apply post process effects.
Here is a screen shot of just the scene drawn with some spot lights, without shadow maps or ambient colours; this would be the result of one of the passes in step. Due do my decision to calculate ambient lighting in step 1, you will notive there is no ambient light here; the buffer only tells me how much each fragment is lit by various lights in the scene.
Ambient light will depend on the intensity of the main light source (the sun or moon etc) and will be rendered on the first pass.
Tomorrow:
Get a single directional light, coming from an arbitrary point in the sky, to work.
Figure out how to render a depth texture, which would be the first step to getting shadow maps working.
If possible: combine the two, so I have a sun / moon shadow effect.
