Realm does normalmaps a bit different, it uses the player position instead of light directions. Big plus its way way faster, downside it only works on brush models but i have a hunch that i could use the inverse of that code to also get alias models bumped. Also a plus you dont need pr pixel lighting it work just fine with standard quake lights. Small downside you would probably have to do some of the resource heavy stuff anyway to get rid of the old blob shadow code.
It does use a normalization cubemap but instead rotates the correct bits by precalculating where the player is.
Yeah hacks can be both good and bad, nehahra uses some truely evil ones
I moved most of neh.c into the main functions,and put some of the weirder stuff in the correct places removing stuff like slomo since it newer worked to well. Realm allready had modplaying support using the midas library (opensource now), i only had to apply code for setting volume as pr nec.c it was luckily pretty easy.
Aye was svc_spawnstatic guess i was tired when i wrote it
and yes it uses bjp1-3, i noticed that the protocol changed at runtime allways starting at 10012 but changing to 15 at map start. This also seems to be the problem as some mods dont seem to like starting at a higher protocol even before map load 
one example is malice which will outright crash unless i set sv_protocol to 15. For the time being i changed bjp's code to allways start at protocol 15 (it started at protocol 10012 as default), no adverse effects yet since it still loads maps like marcher but its kinda weird that it works in his engine and not in mine 
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