It really depends on the complexity of what you're building.

And lots of triangles probably isn't as bad as you think if its in a closed in area.

Post a screenshot so we can see what you're wanting to do. 

With limits of 65000 triangles (or 32000 in really old engines), then a few stairs is not really a problem. Trying to over-simplify the architecture by lifting brushes off the ground etc seems like a good idea, but in reality it often creates more portals and clipnodes. 

Thank you guys for the quick responses. I'm going to keep working at it, and if anything significant turns up I'll return. :) 

just for curiosity(eheh)
What if I use progs.dat from Nehahra?
what implications could arise?(eg. one must have Nehahra installed to play my mod?)

I'm creating my own little progs(small changes such as bg-music,deleted weapons I don't need,..)
BUT really I cannot implement a damn working camera for cutscenes!
And I didn't suspect that Quake is so limited with text/message entities!
I need large portions of colored text viewable on screen at different times during my mod for briefing and storytelling.. suggestions please ? 

for that... you should probably ask at inside3d and get ready to learn csqc. :P 

necros what is csqc? what is that "cs" ?
-already asked at inside3d.. with poor results.. they waste time in minor useless code details but weren't able to explain what I need 

.. making a Q1 machinima in the vein of Nehahra(kudos and respect to it!).. but still missing a camera code and text entities.
Besides I'd prefer stick with my own progs.dat(so no Zerstorer,Custents,etc..) 

i dunno what the cs stands for. but it's special engine supported code (requires engines like darkplaces) so you can change the hud or add stuff like text and such. 

 

thanks :) 

one question.. have u ever used cutscenes in your map? 

i personally can't stand cutscenes unless they're like super short like a couple of seconds or something. 

I'm probably missing something obvious here but not having much luck. How do I set an ambient light level? Using QuakeEd3.1. 

'light' key 

oh sorry, on worldspawn. :P 

RMQ has a nice bit of cutscene capability, maybe some of those guys could help to point you? or...... Join us!!! 

Zerstorer is much smaller than RMQ or Nehahra and has cutscene code.

It is unsupported but does have documentation.

And yeah, another alternative is to join RMQ... 

In the "visions" map on Quaddicted.com is an example of things you want.
It's called the cck kit, a cutscene camera kit, with instructions how to change the screen ingame and centerprint messages controlling the camera to use a certain path.

It is a simple cck.qc and helps you to add the cutscenes by ways of a trigger_once for a perode of time. It's kind of slow but it works.

Play the map and you'll understand. 

pretty sure custents also contains camera code. 

custents has camera code though the progs.dat is a bit messy
my desire was to try and create my own cam but really I have to give up so I guess I'll stick with one of existing progs(custents,vision,zer,nehahra) :) 

I fixed up a bunch of animated textures awhile back and recently reinstalled all Quake stuff into a new harddrive. In Fitz I noticed the animations are now messed (pixels that didn't animate before were now animating). Even some static textures that are part of a set had a different colors ingame. In Wally, the same color was in both textures, therefore no mismatch. The only thing I forgot was installing Scourge and Dissolution (1.07 1.08). So I installed the packs and the animations are fixed. All texture sets are back to having no visable seams ingame again (these texture sets can be put next to each other and have no visable gl blend seam).

Does Fitz 0.85 rely on a particular 1.08 file for the correct palettte to show up, or is it something else? Maybe there's some different palette RGB values for this effect to occur? The Quake palette also has 12 RGB values repeated twice for some reason. Is there extra code applied to the different index numbers of the duplicated colors? 

I don't have an answer for most of your questions, but i can answer this part:

The Quake palette also has 12 RGB values repeated twice for some reason. Is there extra code applied to the different index numbers of the duplicated colors?

The last 32 colors in the palette are "fullbright" which means they do not take lighting or shadows. Some of these fullbright colors are identical in RGB to some of the non-fullbright colors in the palette.

To figure out if fullbright pixels are the problem, try turning on r_fullbright to view the textures without lighting.

I still don't know why the problem would go away with the mission packs installed. Do the mission pack installers update anything in id1? 

I don't really know, but when the packs are installed, regular Quake has the 1.08 in the console. So something's changed there. Btw, I first just installed the original 1.06 version in the cardboard foldout package from 15 years ago (it's still in near mint condition). I don't know if that has anything to do with it. That's when I noticed for about a day and a half there was this problem.

I'll try the r_fullbright for any other texture problems I might have though. I modified, tweeked, made, and stole over 5000 textures combined, so this was a shocker. The thing is, I'm now wondering if the texture fixes I made would be seen in the same way on every Quake setup. 

Any suggestions/advice for making this not look crap but without a lot of detail? The area has a huge monster count so I want to avoid a lot of geometry detail :E

Medieval castle/town thing 

lighting and shadows are "free" detail -- boring lightmaps cost the same as interesting ones. So put in lots of spotlights, dramatic shadows, etc. to break up large surfaces.