No wonder I couldn''t find this thread to follow up on it, it''s in theory not general.

I myself looked into the 2D lighting and this is what I''ve come up with. Using the example in the Isometric Direct3d tile enging I was able to create a 2d renderer using Direct3d with dynamic lighting.

By drawing every tile as a triangle pair, you can apply vertex lighting (wich is done by almost all hardware) to create your lighting. By pre-calculating a light map every frame (Take all your light "sources" and mathematically will an array with light values) you can apply the lighting as you render your tiles. Not only do you get dynamic lighting, you get colored lighting. And the more advanced your pre-calculation routines the fancier your lighting will look.

My first Idea was to use Direct3d Lights, but they don''t fit at all in a 2d game for two reasons. 1) They rely on 3d geometry for bouding, since your map is flat, you''d always get concentric circles vs. bounding by walls etc. and 2) they are alot more computensively heavy.

But with vertex lighting and a little pre-calculation some really nice lighting can be done. If you want the little test thing I hacked together just e-mail me.

-Zims