VDrift Graphical Upgrades

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What sort of other light types and sources do you think we need?

Night time driving is the motivation here. As soon as the dynamic sky is working.
Another thing about my sky implementation. I am calculating the correct sun position, light color(intensity) based on input data.
So the sky is the light emitter. How do I pass this data to the renderer? The scene graph has no support for light emitters.

but it uses a very simple tonemapping that's local to the pixel

You mean: 1-exp(-light*exposure)? I am using the same in the scattering shader.
Have been thinking about replacing it with one based on average luminance.

I think a better material system is needed too.

I have been playing with a modified phong model lately:
I = Ia*ra + Il*(rd*Lambert + CookTorr)
Il: light intensity
rd: diffuse map
Ia: ambient light intensity(reflection environment map scaled by the ambient map)
ra: surface reflectivity
A surface map contains roughness, fresnel term(cooktorr) + reflectivity(ra).

This should allow a greater range of materials. I think it should also be possible to setup/test the materials in blender(not sure if they are using the same equation):