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? 

colored lighting is basically the difference. so it looks at the point in the map with whatever light level, then it subtracts from the lit the the amount stored there to give rgb, so if the lightmap data is different from the .lit lightmap data, you get garbage.

also, delay 5 is like delay 2 except the max light level never goes over the 'light' amount, so you don't get overlit areas that are completely saturated. it's basically an upgraded delay 2 

from tyrlite with a light data from light.exe results in a weird disco light effect, not good. 

i was looking at the vis source code from aguirre's vis.

in soundpvs.c, there's:
if (!Q_strncasecmp (miptex->name, "*water", 6))
Ambient[i] = NoAmbientWater ? -1 : AMBIENT_WATER;
else if (!Q_strncasecmp (miptex->name, "sky", 3))
Ambient[i] = NoAmbientSky ? -1 : AMBIENT_SKY;
else if (!Q_strncasecmp (miptex->name, "*slime", 6))
Ambient[i] = NoAmbientSlime ? -1 : AMBIENT_WATER; // AMBIENT_SLIME;
else if (!Q_strncasecmp (miptex->name, "*lava", 5))
Ambient[i] = NoAmbientLava ? -1 : AMBIENT_LAVA;
else if (!Q_strncasecmp (miptex->name, "*04water", 8))
Ambient[i] = NoAmbientWater ? -1 : AMBIENT_WATER;

you can see that slime gets assigned to AMBIENT_WATER, but it seems as though lava will be assigned AMBIENT_LAVA.
the thing is, it doesn't actually do anything.
i looked through fitzquake source code, but i wasn't able to find the spot that starts and stops the looping ambient sounds (wind and water) depending on where you are. does anyone know more about this? 

those four ambients (sky, water, slime, lava) are global sounds that play in the map, and vis calculates the appropriate volume to play each sound for each leafnode.

I don't have the engine source with me at the moment, but there will be client-side code in there that plays those sounds and adjusts the volumes based on the current leafnode. 

I was curious about some old files I have with quiet remarkable capeabilities. Fact is that I often tried to decompile the progs.dat of files with the
qcc.exe -dec
but then I received the error
Error opening defs.qc: No such file or directory (ENOENT)

Is there a way to translate these stuborn files? 

decompiling 

UnQCC ProQCC and FrikDec can.