Ok, after obtaining a little more knowledge about Quake mapping (stackenblocken actually did help!) and using tronyn's lighting tools, I was able to come up with this so far:
http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/dp20150923220544-00.jpg

Thanks,

Ruin 

Looks interesting ! 

Cool overall design, will be interesting to see it fit into the Quake vibe and scale. Keep it going! 

 

that looks super nice. It looks like you're spending a lot of your "budget" on those railings. If I was you I would try to use alpha or masked textures instead.
https://www.quaddicted.com/files/wads/blood_transparent.zip
you will have to put a { as the first character in the texture name in order for the pink bit to be transparent. And transparency isn't supported in some engines like Dark Places, I hear you can write a shader but I have no clue how that works. You could also make things like cobwebs to get a creepy mansion vibe going on. 

Cool! 

That looks cool, but those railings are exactly what brushes are not for. 

It's fine to build small details like that in brushes in my opinion, but it would be better to use them for detailing in areas where you actually would like to have the player looking.
Along the edges like that it will just be a part of the backdrop and "disappear" even though it's right there. 

I wasn't even aware that there was a way to do transparent textures in the Quake engine without an external file with an alpha channel.

I wanted to avoid transparencies because of this weird bug I've been having in Darkplaces, where any object behind a transparent brush becomes invisible, showing the void behind it (refer to my first map for an example of this).

I know a lot of people have been telling me not to use DP, but I love the features and overall feel of that engine.

Perhaps I can create both a shader file, and use the pink transparent color for support on other engines.

Also, meant to say "Tyrann" not "Tronyn"...sorry Tyrann :(

The _dirt feature is amazing. I hope I don't get carried away with it... 

Yes, I'm pretty sure you need a TGA file with alpha channel, but it works.

About this "bug" you're reporting: BSP compilation deletes faces covered by brushes. Compiler is not aware that you're using a transparent texture on that brush, so if you see through it and there's nothing else behind, you'll see HOM. Make the transparent brush a func_wall and test it again.

Quakespasm and Fitz Mark V have this "{" transparent feature. 

In your Cradle level, darkplaces shows the same shadow artifacts on the ground that made me give up on this engine. QS, MarkV, EzQuake, none of them show these dark spots. You can see them around the graves in the beginning of your level, for example. 

oGkspAz, I've bumped around in your map briefly online, and I think you could add some geometry to block up some of your atriums slightly. I know you had 5v5 in mind, but my impression was that the rooms are too open, and the connecting corridors are really claustrophobic. Sorry if this comes too late :p

To everyone else, does anyone discuss or play quakeworld here? :) 

Take a look at the General Discussion thread, the last 25 posts. 

a hallway and a room for arcane dimensions

http://scampie.net/etc/wip/thing1.jpg
http://scampie.net/etc/wip/thing2.jpg
http://scampie.net/etc/wip/thing3.jpg
http://scampie.net/etc/wip/thing4.jpg 

I love this kind of design, you can't go wrong with it. Looking forward to play.

On a side note, I'm still amazed by how people here love texture mode GL_NEAREST_??, the "pixelized crap", like someone named it. You are conservative folks. 

Won't play any Q1/Q2-engined game in any other mode. Hell no. 

I think I was the one that said "pixelized crap".

The way I see it, Quake was a pioneering game in the world of hardware accelerated 3D graphics with texture filtering. Why use that capability to emulate the appearance of archaic software rendering?

I know a lot of people disagree, and that's fine. It's a personal choice, kind of like whether you want to run Windows 10 and be spied on by Microsoft or not. 

pixelized crap

they are pixel art textures. They are designed to look like that and they look like runny poo when you use blurry filtering. 

"The way I see it, Quake was a pioneering game in the world of hardware accelerated 3D graphics with texture filtering. Why use that capability to emulate the appearance of archaic software rendering? "

Because that's what the art was authored for. Blurring it removes the charm and character from the textures. 

When I played Quake I played it software mode. I played the game with a 3dfx card but even when I had one I still preferred the blocky textures. Also GL mode had rubbish lighting because it lacked overbright. 

"The way I see it, Quake was a pioneering game in the world of hardware accelerated 3D graphics

Actually, GLQuake was rife with all sorts of graphical glitches and compromises that made the game look a bit rubbish compared to the original software version. Please don't point to GLQuake when making an example of what Quake was designed to look like :) 

You are a wise man. 

You are a wise man. 

Why use that capability to emulate the appearance of archaic software rendering?

People is answering: "because it's archaic art". What surprises me is that more people would be largely using Q3 textures to map for QS or MarkV, but most of you rather stick to traditionals.