Absolutely NOT. 

Should be an afterthought at best.

I made my last map using entirely vanilla Quake textures to ensure that if someone used hi-res textures all of the surfaces would be hi-res.

But it sure would have been nice to use the numerous custom textures available. Ultimately most of the people here anyway like the old-school look. The hi-res monster skins look weird for exmaple because the models themselves have such low poly counts. The game is generally more convincing at it's orginal resolution. 

High resolution textures can look absolutely gorgeous, especially coupled with no texture filtering (or the items look out of place).

If you were asking about fan-reimaginations of the Quake texture though, I join the choir (apart from Debaser of course). 

People outside this forum might like the option to have hi-res textures. I see no problem with them. Perhaps provide the hi-res textures as an optional addon pack. 

i've found the greatest enhancement that external textures provides isn't high res, it's freedom from the 256 colour palette. 

I personally have nothing against high res texture (I have produced enough of them over the years) but and I mean a big BUT, you have to consider the bigger picture.

If you upgrade something with better textures then the rest of the game has to match as well. I like to call it the Domino Effect and it has to do with texture density not resolution. The key to good texture work is maintaining texture density across all assets.

As necros said, the best upgrade to Quake would be to free all assets from the 256 colour palette and finally have a rich colour environment. 

Problem with hirez is that its usually done badly. Ugly normalmaps and very busy diffuse maps.

When they're nicely drawn they look great.

Unless they're stretched over the lo-rez meshes of monsters. 

I decided to try out Trenchboom today but I am having problems getting textures to show up. Is TB supposed to load the default textures? I have the editor pointed at my Steam install of Q1 and the models in the entity tab show up correct, but no textures show up in face tab. Under the map properties window its set up for Quake.fgd and looking under id1. I see you can add texture wads here but all of Q1's default stuff is loaded under .pak files.

Is this behavior normal (no textures under face tab) or should I have all of Q1's textures show up in my list? 

Textures should be loaded separately. Go grab some .wads from here. 

I highly recommend reading: http://quakewiki.org/wiki/Getting_Started_Mapping 

I'm doing a video tutorial from absolutely zero aka can't map, don't know how to set up directories etc...

Hopefully the first part will be up soonish (I'm only doing the tutorial, it's being edited by a friend). 

i've found the greatest enhancement that external textures provides isn't high res, it's freedom from the 256 colour palette.

This. 

when setting a fog command in quoth - how does one set the *colour*? 

try sth. like
fog 0.037 0.23 0.22 0.21
were the first number is the density and the last 3 values
rgb ranging from 0.....1. 

thanks 

The fog setting isn't just for quoth, it's supported in most engines on all maps that have that parameters in the worldspawn. I don't think it's a standard parameter though (i.e. not supported in glquake and definitely not winquake), so I don't know why it's not _fog. 

in that case you would just add 'fog x' into worldspawn? 

Yup. 

Anyone know of a decent website or resource where I can download pd music that would be suitable to use in games? I'm looking for sort of a orchestral ambient type sound but really I'll take anything as long as I can use it without hassle :) 

http://freesound.org/browse/ 

PD is hard to find, I would suggest creative commons instead. And for that check my recommendations in the music thread or be more specific. 

This -
http://incompetech.com/

I'm pretty sure Mike Woodham used it on his last map. Not bad stuff either (egoraptor and harry patridge have both used his music) 

I'll check it later! Thanks. 

Wrote an artice/tutorial on outdoor lighting/fake G.I. with Tyrlight
click Hope it's helpful.

Daz: Jamendo ofcourse, tonn of CC licensed music.