I confused Shan's work with Milhous who did use Quark for his XXX. 

there is ambient light shader (same place you set cubemaps for a light) - no shadows, no spec, lights backfaces - every poly that gets into the volume. Use with care (dark color) or it looks shite

some crap about lightmaps ( I didnt try)
http://www.doom3world.org/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?t=8045&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=20 

Stay clear of ambient lights, they wash out stuff too much. Instead place the lights so in the editor, that each face has only two overlapping lights touching. This might not be always entirely possible, but keep trying. And darkness is a tool just as lights. Areas with a lot of contrast can look very good. 

i'll give all these suggestions a try then.
i guess a lot of the problem is that i'm not used to having everything so dark like this...

i miss my q1 softshadows too. :P 

You just need to be careful to leave it pretty dark--if you brighten it up much at all things do indeed look like ass. 

And don't think of ambient as a full map thing, this is small, controlled ambient we're talking about in areas that would logically have a dim light all over. And to avoid some of the wash out, you just have your normal lights be whiter than others in darker areas (leaving lights full-on white for general use generally looks a bit too bright in contrast to the dark) 

The problem with ambient light in Doom3 is that it doesn't pay attention to normal maps (to my knowledge). All contours of the surface are shaded equally, which makes ambient lighting even more flat and ass-like than in in the Q engines. Even ambient light has bias towards a particular direction or range of directions - it's bouncing off of walls and crates and things.

I think a good go-between, if anybody who writes this crazy ass shader things is reading, would be to shade with the blue channel of the normal map as an intensity map. It'll show the contour of the surface still, looking as if the light were coming at the surface from directly in front of it, but still shade the surface pretty uniformly.

Not enough hours in the day, man. 

You end up adding lightcounts by 1 on every surface at the area you are using the ambient light at. You have to be really careful about adding further lights after that. Same goes for fog since it's a light too. In my experience fogged areas tend to have lightcounts predominantly in green-blue, and i'd bet it's the same with ambients.

I don't think D3 mappers in general should worry about map having pillars, corners and stuff with 0 lights on one side or something. Place some materials with fullbright elements there for example. Looks kickass.

Also try using lights that go over the 1 1 1 RGB value scale. Some odd effects there. The doublebright cubemap materials for lights are quite nifty too. And remember to split brushes at light area boundaries when necessary (X or Y flip the texture so the bsp won't re-merge the brushes). Brush your teeth every morning and respect your elders. 

Isnt there a switch to make 'compiler' split according to light volumes?

btw there is interesting solution in the above d3w link (page 1) - shaders that add-blend the colormap
cheap (as in looks but in performance too) 

But you don't want to turn that on. You'll just end up with billion split polys. You get better results by splitting the most offending brushes (80% of time the floor) by hand. 

man, first i needed to align my brushes on the grid, now i need to align my lighting? O_o

hehehe, lol, so manual brush splitting it is then.

in general, how much of a gain is there on this? ie: is it really worth doing or just if you want to try to get an extra 1 or 2 fps here and there? 

what about lights on models?

say i modelled a large structure or something like that and there were no brushes used at all (well, except the caulked ones behind to seal the map) does it matter how many lights hit a model?
and does the size of a model matter as well?

what about large swathes of terrain? 

Forgive my stupid question but are all the custom textures I have used for my Quake level (made in WC) within the bsp so that I could just throw away all the texture wads I have used and they'd still remain in the level?

It's just that this is all new to me - because I remember that when I made a map for Q3A you had to store the JPGs/TGAs with the pk file along with the actual level. The same with Duke3D for which I have been mapping lately (since -97) - you always had to include Tiles***.art file with the level or the textures vanished. 

Yes, you're correct. In Q1, when you make a map, all the textures are included in the .bsp so you don't need to include the .wad. 

Great to hear - thanks.

Anyways - where to get that Unreal rock texture which has been used in Quake levels lately? 

from the bsp of that map perhaps?!!! :D

Grab a copy of texmex (google is your friend) as that proggy can open q1 bsps and save the textures to .wad 

boy, did this freak me out when i first saw it:
Full: 50.71%, Elapsed: 69h 10m, Left:13770h 29m, Total:13839h 39m, 0%

luckily, it eventually smoothed out to about 5 more hours. hehe 

n general, how much of a gain is there on this? ie: is it really worth doing or just if you want to try to get an extra 1 or 2 fps here and there?

It is worth it. The area pictured here went from 25fps to 40fps after aligning lights to minimize overlaps and splitting brushes at light edges.

http://www.kolumbus.fi/ville.nieminen/progress.jpg

And yes, keep the light on grid. It makes life much easier when you lights are on atleast 8 unit grid. If you are going to hit one brush with two lights, it doesn't matter if the overlap is 64 or just 1 unit. Result is the same, so keep the grid coarse.

Models behave just like any brush geometry when it comes to lightcount. If one side of the model is lighted and another isn't, the other side shows as red (1) and tris in darkness as black (0). Exactly the same if it was built from brushes. Doom3 doesn't care to what entity the tris belong to, they all behave the same when it comes to lighting. Terrain in Doom3 is made from models also (huge models), so it isn't a special case. Size is irrelevant.

Speaking of size.. Not many know this, but Doom3 models can be resized in the editor. The rotation of objects is defined via transformation matrix, which also contains the multiplication factor for size. See the rotation key/value pair. For unrotated model it is something like "1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1". Change it to "2 0 0 0 2 0 0 0 2", and see the model size double. D3Editor will reset these values if you rotate the model again, but you can re-type them should you need to. 

thanks for all the info! :)

looks like i've got my work cut out for me... this looks like it will take about 10x as long as a normal q1sp. O_o 

I found some prefabs (for military stuff) on the web, but many of them don't have the related textures.
I tried to "self-create" the textures, but it was fully unsuccessfull, due to my lack of kowledge in this domain.. So where can I find full (.map + .wad) prefab ?? Or at least some cool textures of Jeep, Tanks, Missile, etc.. etc.. 

Hehe, five digit hours, that's 577 days ... 

I was just trying to experiment with different skies but I can only see one - the one I used first. Should every sky texture be the same? (WorldCraft) 

Yes, only the first sky texture loaded will be displayed on every skyface in the map, afaik. 

But I can still change the sky for the level if I replace every skyface with the new one? 

Yes, that is correct.