Hi, I'm a big fan of Nexuiz and open source games in general. I have dabbled a bit in modding nexuiz, but I mostly mod for doom 3. I have a few questions about the engine, I'm trying to decide whether or not I'd be better off waiting for the Doom 3 source release or just jumping in and investing the time to learn the ins and outs of darkplaces.

Firstly, stencil shadows. Can all map geometry cast them? Is it a matter of designating a brush a func_static or something? I see maps like skyway incorporating a lot of stencil shadows on the higher settings, but still this only seems to be selected parts of the geometry.

Second, is it possible and practical to build an entire map in blender and then use radiant only for vis blocking? Does the light compiler play nicely with large meshes? Can I make animated props in blender and import them? I would have to convert them to .md3 right?

About the normal mapping. Sometimes this seems to work better than other times. Am I right in thinking that sometimes what seems to be normal mapping is infact displacement mapping or parallax mapping or some other more fancy type of "mapping"? Look at the round piece of bumpy earth on the homepage screenshot for an example of what I mean.

Also, is there any level of artist control over the hardness value of the specularity or is this something that's hard coded?

Thanks people for putting up with all the questions.

1. All geometry can cast stencil shadows, but you have to manually place realtime lights with the ingame editor (r_editlights?) Keep in mind they seem to be quite resource intensive in darkplaces...

2. Well it sure is possible, but from my experience the lightgrid gets really blurry (as in low-res) on the entire mesh if even one polygon is too big...

3. About normlalmapping: Correct, the normal map can contain a parallaxmap/bumpmap in it's aplpha channel.