   emulating dynamic lighting on a large scale
  hey guys, here''s the situation:you have 300 or 400 players in an online RPG. i want a character to be able to light up a lamp or magical item and basically spawn a point light on that position, most cards support 8 lights max. Ive thought about ways to count the number of active lights and ways to prioritize who gets real lights and who gets lightmaps. It just feels like a hack. Now im trying to think of a way to emulate dynamic lighting via software to overcome the lighting issue. Im thinking about an additional pass(DX) using nontransformed but lit vertex format and calculating the color of the second passaccording to the scene data. 2 problems here, 1) slow2) still feels like a hack.im not fluent in volume textures so this may be a silly question, but is there a way to use a 3d lightmap to emulate dynamic lighting and if so what would the quality and cost be?i dont need code just theory, thx for any help. 
  Each light has a max distance (not including directional lights), which is just a bounding sphere. When you come to drawing a mesh in the scene, you run through the lights seeing which lights influence the mesh via its bounding sphere. Obviously you will only be allowed 8 lights on a mesh, so if you need more lights on that mesh, you can draw it multiple times with different sets of lights and use blending to get the disired effect.That should get you started - it will be slow though as you will be checking each light against each mesh, so you will need to have some kind of octree or quadtree to cull out most of the lights.Hope this helpsJim 