I recently wrote a new shader to help our 3D artists regarding light mapping. Dynamically rendered shadow maps are expensive, and so providing a simple lightmap shader for static shadows will provide considerable performance gains.

This shader allows a diffuse, light map, normal and specular texture to be input. Phong lighting is also provided.

I later updated the shader to take on an emissive map, and for a bit of fun allowed the intensity of the emissivity to vary over time (using a sine wave, no surprise there), e.g., providing an animation. This will be useful for making game pickups more obvious to the player.

Graphics is fun!