I am currently doing some research on lighting. Although I have some knowledge of 3D and some basic programming skills I am walking around in the dark here. I am not asking for a fully detailed solution, I just would like to have some hints & basics.

How do I incoorporate lighting into textures.?

To give you an example, the headlights of a car. I can map these lights onto a plane, and super-impose these over the another bitmap (eg. terrain texture). The super-imposing, should that be done in normal memory, or perhaps the texture memory on the 3D card? Are there functions built-in into the Glide API? or OpenGl?

As you can see I am still wet behind the ears here.

Thanks for your time,

If understand correctly, vertex lighting is possible.
This means that the 'resolution'/density of the mesh greatly affects the level of detail in the lighting.
That's something I'd like to avoid, but perhaps this _is_ the best solution possible on today's hardware.

I'd rather do it at texture level. Or perhaps combines the (lightmap & vertexlighting). Anyone else experience here?

The headlight texture is mapped to a quad, and the quad slides around on the ground. Or with multi-texture, the texture coordinates slide around.

This sorta thing is what a lot of people call a 'lightmap', a texture that stores lighting information.