Echoing the sentiments of everyone else here, this is a
really cool mod. Very happy to see this. I hope FF7-PC can be configured/modded to take control of your lighting system, somehow!
Right now there is only one single directional light but it should not be too difficult to add support for point/spot lights. [...] I also read about the game already having some kind of lights (point lights?), so maybe we can use those because implementing a way to manually place lights would be a lot of work I think.
So.. I've asked about FF7's lighting before, and I ended up doing some testing over this weekend. What I found is that the way lighting works in FF7 isn't quite like you'd expect.
Here's a huge post with what I was able to figure out about lighting in FF7.
The short version is: Field models have one ambient color and three lighting channels, each with three axes. Each channel controls light intensity on a specific axis (it accepts positive and negative values, where "0" is the center of the range and represents zero strength), and then the actual light direction is determined based on the values of the three axes.
Lights are local to each model. An NPC can move around, and their lighting will follow their position — but lighting on FF7-PC is affected by model rotation.
However, the way lighting is processed in FF7-PC is broken. The correct lighting data is still in the game, and it looks correct when the first lighting channel is isolated. But as far as I can tell, the PC version may be displaying *too much* lighting information, or maybe isn't blending the lighting correctly. (Model textures also don't receive lighting correctly. The most simple fix is for their brightness to be multiplied by 2 via shader.)
Unfortunately (or fortunately, if you want a clean slate to work with), there are no point lights in any of the scenes. There are foreground layers that are blended additively, but that's about it.