I guess I'll put my input into this as well.
I've seen plenty of sprite-based games that can make wonderful use of lighting effects. Standing by what most said, I don't think the lighting effects commonly used in 1.09.4 were well implemented. I honestly don't feel that the old corona effects fit into a game like SRB2 either. I don't think the question here is how would lights be implemented into SRB2's current rendering engine, but its if those lights would be necessary for a game like SRB2. I think the only way to get them to look nice is if you could have certain shader effects applied to them so that each effect doesn't carry the Sun's luminosity. Along with this, effects like the Super Sonic aura described in the first post couldn't be done with lighting effects alone but would also need some sprite-based support to keep the effect from looking massively corny.
I've seen plenty of sprite-based games that can make wonderful use of lighting effects. Standing by what most said, I don't think the lighting effects commonly used in 1.09.4 were well implemented. I honestly don't feel that the old corona effects fit into a game like SRB2 either. I don't think the question here is how would lights be implemented into SRB2's current rendering engine, but its if those lights would be necessary for a game like SRB2. I think the only way to get them to look nice is if you could have certain shader effects applied to them so that each effect doesn't carry the Sun's luminosity. Along with this, effects like the Super Sonic aura described in the first post couldn't be done with lighting effects alone but would also need some sprite-based support to keep the effect from looking massively corny.