I was about to answer my own question there. Just figured it out, but thanks :) 

I am looking for 'pretty' skyboxes of setsets and/or sunrises - think happiness as opposed to doom laden. Can anyone point me in the right direction (and I don't mean go west young man) 

sunsets: the letters aren't even next to each other on the keyboard 

http://www.quaddicted.com/webarchive/kell.quaddicted.com/skyboxes.html 

Thanks 

http://www.quake3world.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=9242 

When making quake 1 maps with gtkradiant 1.5, where do I put the texture files? And do I leave them as .wad or export them to a different file format? 

You need wad files directly in your quake directory, e.g.: Z:/Quake/id.wad.
You also need to set the key "wad" with the path to the wad in the worldspawn. 

z:/quake/id1/id.wad 

Do clip, skip and trigger textures affect lightmaps? 

Trigger textures certainly do - the map compiler has no idea what the classnames on your entities mean and has to assume that you want the option to render them (in fact some speedrunning mods have the option to show triggers in practice mode). Scaling textures that you know won't be seen by massive percentages ought to save some maps. 

skip does as well.

from what i understand, the skip'd faces are still in the bsp file, but they are moved to a point after a marker that tells the engine not to draw them, so they are loaded, just not drawn. 

skip and trigger generate lightmaps.

clip does not.

Theoretically qbsp.exe could be modified to natively understand skip; and then it would be possible to truly remove them from the bsp, reducing lightmaps and marksurfaces. But the current skip tools available merely hide them from rendering using a hack. 

 

Is there a Q1 compiler which works with func_group entities?

I am currently using TreeQBSP v2.05 (10/04/2007) modified by Bengt Jardrup, but it leaks if I have any func_group entities in my map. 

i know that aguirre's txqbsp does. just add -group to enable the support. 

I assume you are talking about this version of qbsp? (http://user.tninet.se/~xir870k/)
The program (qbsp) tells me -group is not supported, I checked the readme file and it has no mention of it. Are you using a special version not listed on his homepage? 

the file you want is the txqbspbjp.zip which contains his txqbsp. This one supports -group.

it's only his treeqbsp that does not support -group. 

Ok that was confusing, I looked at the website and saw qbsp to be newer and assumed it was the correct one to download.

The txqbsp does not support -oldaxis and -transwater switches, I assume this ok? 

aguirre's txqbsp uses -altaxis and automatically builds transparent water (you can disable this with -nowatervis) 

why he maintained 2 slightly different forks of bsp in parallel. It's not as if there were any obvious reasons given regarding why we should use one over the other. I use Tx, for reasons that I can't actually remember now, but I'm sure were valid at the time. 

tx supports everything tree does, but also supports floating point coordinates. unless there's anything else, there's really no reason to use treeqbsp. 

that Tree supported floating point in exactly the same way that Tx does. That's what it says in the readme files anyway. 

oh maybe it's the 'etp' thing then? enhanced texture precision? 

supported in both, according to the readmes. In fact, going from the readmes, the main features list of both tools appear to be identical.