Quote Originally Posted by Not Inferno View Post
Halo used a texture to do its lighting. Essentially radiosity would calculate lighting and then save it to a texture. A high quality radiosity can provide some pretty nice lighting with very little work for the gpu. But radiosity is completely static.

My engine currently uses shadow mapping and glow lighting which is all real time and is kind of expensive on the gpu. Since its real time though I can adjust the shadow quality to be higher near the player and I can also use that same lighting information to apply shadows to the first person models and what not.
Why can't you do baked textures for levels which you just layer shadows from non-bsp geometry onto?