This might be slightly off topic, but I thought this was slightly interesting. In an article on 1up.com that talked about Quake's development history, this paragraph caught my eye:
Tech changes and trouble plagued Quake's early development. At one point, Carmack set up the engine so that every entity in the game was stored in its own level. Romero explains, "Let's say that we build this whole space out and there's supposed to be a door that moves. Anything that's going to move had to have its own level by itself, lit up correctly, and whatever that lighting is getting put on that object has to look exactly the way it would inside of the [stage it's going into]. There's no way to replicate the lighting correctly from inside...there's no way to say, 'I'm a door sitting in a void with some lights hitting it. There's no way to match that so it looks good inside the other level too, that's just not right."
Romero lobbied Carmack to change the system and he eventually acquiesced.
As we all know, Gamestudio has used this system for level entities since A4.
It seems to me that Gamestudio was always heavily influenced by the Quake engine. Unfortunately since Gamestudio was never developed for any particular game it seems that problems like this were just never corrected when they were being created. I've always felt just like Romero about them, too.
