In fact they are central to most modern games. You can scale, wrap and animate textures. A material controls whether an object is shiney, dull, or appears to emit light. Use the IDirect3DRMMaterial interface to control this feature. Lights Lights can be colored, or they can be just plain white ramp lights.
Ambient lights illuminate an entire scene.
This tends to create a very flat look. Lighting is much more important than it might appear at first. A scene with good lighting is many times better than an ordinary scene lit with ambient light. IDirect3DRMFrame are the key objects when working with lights. This is a technique to make sure time is not wasted drawing surfaces that are never shown to the user.