Please look at the current games and even at render pictures. You will notice very fast: Realism does not come mainly from polygons or textures. It comes in the most cases from lighting. Lights and shadows are the key.

Take a good scene an analyze what you see. I do that very often since I do texture creating at the moment. The same texture looks dull, non-metallic and flat without lighting. Now comes the light, a normal map, a specular map and even a depth map - the texture begins to look realistic and it starts to reflect light in certain spots.

With added shadows the scene becomes almost real.

This little story just tells you that real artists especially need one tool: lights and shadows to make professional scenes. So I understand DEX very much. This is the part what makes the artwork impressive. No matter how many good scripting functions are in the engine.

What does that mean for A6/A7? We need for future updates static and dynamic lights in combination with shaders (normal and parallax mapping with specular highlights). I am very happy that Conitec is going this way now. They want to provide shaders in a template and they want to improve the scene management to use shaders on top of level geometry. So it could become what I have in mind.

But DEX is still missing shadows on terrain. Did you ever create a terrain with shadows? I did. It is a big amount of work. When you use the template shader then you have to paint the shadows or you have to generate them in another tool like Freeworld3D, Gile(s) or in your rendering application. After that you import all in WED. You do not see the tiled textures and you have to place models almost blind.

Did you ever check IceX2 (a tool from a forum user). This one shows how it can be done. It is a terrain in-game editor that places objects, paints terrain and calculates shadows for the hills (but unfortunately not for level or model geometry).

At the end you got my vote for the best lighting and shadow system available

Regards,
Frank