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Dynamic Lighting and World Maps

In a game I'm playing in we're having a problem with effectively combining exploration on a world map with Dynamic Lighting(without API stuff, GM account is only Plus).  The basic idea was to give us players the possibility to explore the map more on our own without the necessity for the GM to always reveal tiny pieces from the Fog of War when we stumble into unexplored regions, but also to keep areas where we already have been revealed. The only work around so far we found was to drop lights all around the map where we have been, but this isn't really an elegant solutions and also resulted in a performance drop for some players sometimes when the shadow calculations became more complex because we hadn't be in a few tiny places on the map or because of light line blocking areas (eg high mountains) where we're not supposed/able to go. Is there a better way to achieve what we want (basically exploration with less work for the GM, be it revealing FoW or updating DL obstructions)?
Only other way would be to use the actual fog of war and remove the black fog as you explore or hiding the map with tokens or revealing it one piece at a time.
Okay, thanks for the answers.
Not sure if this will help but I had a similar issue recently. My players were in a giant steading.  Being an architectural student, I had the bright idea of allowing them to get into the rafters.  Long and complicated map creation followed.  The problem was that they couldn't see into the rooms below because of the walls, but the light from the rooms would be visible into the rafter area.  To solve the problem, I simply blanked out the rooms with a block drawn on the map layer, leaving the tops of the walls visible.  The blocks on the map didn't interfere with the lighting (which caused a few issues, but was better than nothing).  The only problem was having 2 maps (one of the rafter area and one of the ground level) and switching between them. This sort of thing (blank blocks on top of the map) might be useful when combined with other methods.
You could maybe create a deck with a black "back" side and each card with the corresponding front. Place them all on the map,face down, then flip them as you explore. However, depending on the size of the tokens/amount, that may end up lagging you a bit as well.
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The Aaron
Pro
API Scripter
Oooh!  Clever!