Hi Paul
First of all, as you already noticed Ca3D is going to support both methods of light, static and dynamic (hardware based lights)
Many current AAA titels like Doom3, HL2 or Farcry are using different techniqes to provide nice gfx on your screen.
Doom 3 only knows dynamic lights, so all(!) lights can be manipulated in runtime, in addition it also supports the famous "stencil shadowing".
Those things are providing a realistic behavior on surfaces that support different materials (normal map, diffuse map, specular etc.)
The artist can control the look of a surface in a very flexible way.
The negative side is, that all those lights and shadows are pretty heavy calculations even on very modern hardware.
Doom3 aimed on a dense atmosphere, small rooms, very dark, quite claustrophobic, and a "technical" world.
Basically I want to know how is the pre-calculated lights going to draw the realistic shadows you get when you use dynamic lights
Precalculated lights are drawing a precalculated shadow
for geometry, not for models or static meshes.
Thats one of the big problems if you want the world to be uniform. Stencilshadows will give you the option to create a uniform light and shadow system for the cost of performance and the typical sharp shadow.
A third option would be to also support softshadows or shadowmapping, like it is used in HL2.
However those shadows can only be used for models and static meshes but not for geometry.
They are also very tricky in some situations but very fast..
The main rule for dynamic lights is to have only small lights (better lights with a small radius) and as less as possible on one surface ! Each light that reaches a surface will force one added pass to render all.
were I found its not weird for a room to have 8 lights where in real life 1 would have been needed
Sure but you forget something
In reality, lightrays are bounced from each surface as long as they emit photons.
This is the concept of the precalculated light in Ca3D (and other software) called "radiosity". Its static but very realistic.
In doom3 there is only dynamic light, however those light are not bouncing anything. So in this point of view those lights are unrealistic..
So ID Softwares leveldesigner had to cheat and thats why you have more than one light in one room:
-one primary basic light, that drops the shadow
-few secondary lights to fake bounced light