Originally posted by VL-Tone
Originally posted by Gecko
The usage of one texture will open us the doors to sand, ice, slide or grass levels, for example.
I wonder if one will be able to distinguish geometry inside the level when only one texture is used. Does the engine create shadows?
Is the light source always the same or does it vary from level to level?
As far as I remember, the clock level uses fog. Have you found the corresponding level flag?
I think the question regarding creating new painting-level-entrys has already been asked, I'll probably recheck the thread.
The engine doesn't create real shadows by itself, but it does create live shading with a light source. And don't confuse the two: "shadows" are the dark areas projected by objects in the opposite direction as the light source, while "shading" is the fact that objects themselves will be less dark on the side of the light source. There are shadows in the game (such as under the bridge), but these are "baked" right into the level geometry and not generated live.
Fog is indeed used in some levels (including Bob Omb Battlefield), for now it will be turned off in custom levels in v0.6, but I'll probably add a way to turn it on or off in version 0.6.1 or so, as well as other global level parameters.
Creating new painting entrances would indeed be too much complicated as I explained, but you could create a hub level that would replace the castle, and use warp pipes and other kinds of warps to get to your levels. You'll have to be careful then to modify the exit warp (death or success) in your custom levels so that they point at exits in your hub levels instead of inside the castle.
Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions! 
I understand what you mean and those baked shadows always looked darker than everything else in the game.
Do you know if the fog changes anything enginewise, e.g. allowing more geometry to be used because it adds vis-blocking? Visibility blocking refers to the engine not drawing level geometry behind a certain distance such as the object vis-blocking (objects will pop up when you reach a certain distance).
Is there vis-blocking when creating two rooms which are completely seperated from each other or is the level geometry always fully drawn?
You told us that your spiral level almost reached the engine limitations. I've been creating maps for the half-life engine which has a lot of limitations and there you have to possibility to lower the number of leaves by upscaling the texture.

On this picture every square resembles a leaf.
If you scale the texture up or down, the leaf also becomes bigger or smaller. The more leaves there are, the more often a texture gets repeated and the more hardware ressources are used resulting in reaching engine limitations when a texture often gets repeated/when there are many textures and texture recurrences drawn.

This would usually mean that you aren't able to create huge levels, but look at Banjo-Tooie for example. Rare created huge levels by scaling textures up, maybe it's also possible with Mario 64.
There are some maybe unwanted texture recurrences in your spiral map. If you look at 1:58 in the video, you'll see that the texture is scaled down. If you're able to scale it up again, you will maybe be able to set some more polygons free. Additionally, you could scale the texture in the whole map up in order to free up polygons if this experiment worked.
Does Mario 64 have a debug menu? Maybe there would be a subitem showing you how many polygons are drawn helping you with the engine limitations.
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