I can't use old drivers forever
Do you have an older card? If so, using the latest drivers is not always recommendable. 

Upgrade to WC3.3?

If both ATI and Nvidia have problems then it seems stupid to blame two different companies - maybe the software architecture is just bad. 

My current card is an 8800gt, only about 2 years old. Why wouldn't upgrading to the latest drivers be a good idea?

I haven't tried WC 1.6 with an ATI card, do you know if it has the same problem, or a similar problem? 

WC 1.6 is a very old program, designed for Windows98. In WC3.3 I have occasionally encountered a bug where you cant select faces in the 3D view, and you can then only grag the view around in the 2D views and cant select anything. Rebooting the computer fixes the error. I always use the latest drivers for my 8800 card, in XP32. Forceware 186.16 is the current stable build, and works fine for me.
Orl - I recommend you make the transition to 3.3 because it has many other improvements over 1.6/1.6a, i.e. texture lock works properly etc 

Because at some point drivers tend to put the focus on new(er) cards and contain changes that may result in worse performance (or even glitches) for old(er) ones. So sometimes it's wise to stick with an older version if it works fine (and if newer ones don't seem to bring any visible gain).
I don't know how it is with a 8800gt (or two year-old cards) - it takes a bit of experimenting with driver version. 

Is worth the change overall. The texture control is a huge bonus.

It has its quirks, but you get used to them. The only ballache is converting the textures, that is automated thanks to Baker's pack, but when it doesn't work it's frustrating. 

skip textured brushes cast shadows?
skip can be run after aguire's q1 tools? 

Yes.
Yes. 

going to build a shadow mesh for a large door out of skip then.

... except that i just realized... skip will cause the interior to be void... when the origin of the door travels through the skip brush, it might flicker or disappear? o.o 

Also players may find it hard to walk through the opened door with skip brushes there. 

in software renderer, a func_door surface that is coplanar with a structural skip surface will not be drawn. So make your shadowcaster thinner than the func_* object.

And what preach said, the skip will be collidable, so hopefully you have a plan for dealing with that :) 

your door won't disappear as long as part of the bounding box is inside a visible leaf. 

it is the bounding box that determines visibility then.
i guess i should have realized that. :P

thanks for clearing that up, and yes, it wouldn't be used for an actual door, but things like extending bridges (that aren't accessible anyway) or towers that move as well as rotaters. 

aguire's light.exe.
does it support coloured lighting normally?
i see that it supports -tyrlite95 which is supposed to do coloured lighting, but i can't seem to figure out how to actually get it to generate a .lit file.
also, is the spawn key '_color' or 'color'? 

aguirRe's light tool does not support colored lights by default AFAIK. You would need to add the "-tyrlite95" in order to enable it, but I never tested this feature. I also guess you need to add a "-lit" option in your command line in order to enable .lit file generation, but I'm not sure. Also, the spawn key is "_color"...
Experimentation is the better school there ;) 

i messed with it yesterday, but it doesn't seem to actually work.

-tyrlite95 works, that alone doesn't generate a .lit.
according to the tyrlite docs, you're right, you need -lit before it generates anything. unfortunately, -lit is an invalid command line arg for aguirre's light. :S

so it looks like it's either use the real tyrlite and make do without sunlight stuff and delay 5 lights, or colours. :P 

Other solution is to ask aguirRe about his modified tyrlite light tool.... I'm using it actually... The only penalty is it does not support the second sunlight.. but is it really a problem ? 

Modified Tyrlite light tool!?!?

I hit an "entities" limit (of 2048 I think) with the last map. Does the modified tool allow for more entities in the map (not light entities, but ALL entities)? I had to keep switching entities about just so I could light the map! lol . . . . 

I clearly don't know: ask aguirRe directly 

This sounds odd. Why would the compilers refuse to accept a map that exceeds a limit. Usually it's the engine.
I don't know if it helps in this case, but you could give the -hilimit option a try. 

-hilimit is required for QBSP processing, or am I wrong ? 

Starkmon was already released, with exactly 2048 entities in it :)

But when I tried to run tyrlite with more entities in the map than that it threw out an "excessive entities" error and wouldnt run.....

Annoying at the time. Although it brings light (no pun intended) to the issue: with all of these expanded limit engines, coloured light can only be applied to maps with less that 2048 enitities..... 

hmap2 supports sunlight etc, AND colored lights.

The result looks noticeably different from bjp-light though. :-/

There's probably some command line option buried somewhere that makes it behave like tyrlite etc.

Coloured light / tyrlite is somewhat old, hence maybe the limit thing.

Hack the source to increase the numbers? Or try hmap2.

Or ask Willem to hack colored lighting into bjp-light. I really can't do it atm, my schedule is full. 

i'll ask. i tried hmap2 and tyrlite out but i can't believe the difference not having all the extra stuff aguirre added. it's like going back 5 years. :P 

Can't you just use aguirRe's tool for the lightmap data and independently from that Tyrlite for the .lit file?
Assuming you don't want colored sunlight. How does the delay 5 attenuation formula differ from the regular one?