That's so cool

Something like that has already been done.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UY07b...eature=related

It's a little crude, and at a certain perspective it looks like the walls are actually in 3D. But it can be done.

That's not really the same thing, though.

What makes you say that?

Well I think he's referring to shadows like on the house tiles for example..

In the morning the shadows would be on the one side of the house like they are now. At noon there would be no shadows. At evening the shadows would be on the other side, till the eventual night and the cycle repeats.

Well, that isn't hard to make though. I just made that 3D wall effect on testbed ;o

Well I say it because it's essentially a cut and dry, minimalistic, but essentially backbone approach. It's the very basics of lighting -- calculating a point where light does not reach, and stop drawing the light; but that's it. It's very 2-dimensional, and doesn't even take into consideration height of objects... simply because it's very complicated to do so. For example, a table, or even a vase, will stop the light just as much as a whole wall or tree. It is also calculated by tile... which means it won't take into consideration the shape of the actual object, like a round rock will stop at the edge of the tile, therefor way past the boundry of the rock.

And simply: it's not very aesthetic. There are no shading buffers, it's CPU intensive, calculations will end up being inaccurate to lessen the load on the CPU, and it's greatly limited by dimensions. The ones posted are not very accurate in terms of real lighting, but they make up for it by being aesthetically pleasing.