2D lights

#1 This was touched on in another thread, but I believe the answer is there won't be any official lighting effects because most of what you need can actually be done through blending and particle effects (which are already in there). The way lighting effects work, they are more suited to the 3D environment. For example, in T2D all of the graphic sprites are simple flat images - they don't contain any information that would direct how they could be lighted. The way things are going, if you need an advanced look to a game you could probably just build a top-down view 3D game in TGE...

#2 In addition to what Steve said (for example see the fishdemo where just a few sprites in the background are blended to look like moving sunbeams through the water)

also consider that in the latest version of T2D, you can use .dts (3d) objects in your 2d game. You could "bake" textures with lighting onto the .dts mesh objects. You could animate the textures to turn the lighting on and off. Cool huh :-)

#3 It should actually be cool to do shader-sprites someday to get lighting.