most shaders and material effects ive seen use sun light or dynamic lights, which, I believe are limited to 32. is there a way to use static lights for shaders to give a doom3 type look? metal shaders on my weapons and skin shaders on my characters look odd when they appear to me lit from one direction when the rest of the level is lit from another direction......

You can use vecSkill1, vecSkill5, vecSkill ... to send light positions to the shader

dynamic lights are limited to 8, not 32.

render in shaded mode, rewrite the mapping coordinates of skin1 (the diffuse map), add the skin2 (the shadow map generated in the build process) and that is it. but beware, my experiments were limited to 12 fps in a damn small level.

the alternative is a ffe which does almost the same, though it does not react dynamically on light changes. these ffes slow down even more.

atm, there seems to be no other good and fast way than presented in sphere engine.

[EDIT] i just re-read your post. do you refer to level blocks (the method i described above) or models (then forget what you read).
what about switching some dynamic light off when thy are not visible (or at a certain distance)?

I was referring 2 models.

anyway, I followed up on what u sais about dynamic lights. The manual mentions that dlights are limited 2 8 in one section and 32 on another.

I believe the 32 limit comes to play when dynamic lights are created using my.lightrange flag for entities.so is there another way 2 create dlights that are limited to 8?

shaders 4 level blocks will be gOOd. I believe there is a demo caleed shadercollection. But I still havent figured out how 2 use it