Lightmap or Vertex Light?

I am having a bit of a dilemma regarding whether to use lightmapping or vertex lighting.

I am planning a dungeon master style game and would love eerie dark shadows.

As is typical of these games the player will be carrying a torch and of course the torch will not brighten the areas in shadow if I use lightmaps, I would also like spells e.g. fireball to brighten up the scenery as they move through it.

The other option then is vertex lighting and I have experimented with tesselated meshes to improve the quality of it.

The only problem then is that the modelling packages I have can't handle that amount of vertices and still run at interactive speeds unless I only model one room at a time.

What would you choose and why?

You've done a pretty good job of covering the pros and cons. Vertex lighting is also quicker to set up and doesn't require keeping track of all those extra textures, or keeping them in memory for that matter. My recommendation is to go with vert colors, find a nice balance between quality and efficiency, and try to keep the tesselation down.

Then again, I'll let you know when I make my own Dungeon Master style game... ;)

I digging up this thread again because I'm going round in circles ^^

Having tesselated geometry is all well and good but when you start thinking about lighting it up you have the problem that using any number of hardware lights will cause some pc's to grind to a halt.

Vertex colours don't brighten the scene at all, and using them means you lose entityalpha and have to use vertex alpha instead which can be another bottleneck for some pc's.

Also hardware lights and vertex colour don't exactly look great by anyones standards.

I've decided to turn the system on it's head and instead of trying to control lighting I will see what controlling the shadows is like...I am hoping this should create a more atmospheric look.

I've just registered for a shareware copy of Shawn's shadow system and am looking forward to trying it out...now to untesselate all those rooms ;)