Ok, I'm new to HL mapping.

Until this moment, I've only done some boxed rooms with some bridges and (with a little luck) some rounded corners. Placed a player entity in it, compiled the map and hopped around like a crazy rabbit, singing "I compiled my first HL map ... but it kinda sucks !"

I have some questions:

When there's a leak in your map, is the lightening still compiled ? I compiled one of my boxed rooms (after I placed some red light entity somewhere in the middle), and when I get into the map all the walls look so bright, but not red ... there's no light source ... ok, so I read the report, and it says I have 3 leaks. Ok, no big deal, but I want to know ... is it because of those leaks my lights didn't make it ?

Another question: I want to get rid of those boring boxed rooms, I want to try some "outside" stuff ... it can be very simple, like 2fort or something ... but how do I create a skybox ? (without creating huge leaks)

Correct, there's no entity lighting when a map has a leak. Its not a good idea to ignore compile error messages as it means the map will have problems.

The skybox is pretty easy to do - select the texture called "sky", its light blue, select the rooms ceiling brush and click Apply Current Texture tool to apply the sky tex to all faces of the brush. All brush faces must have this texture or you'll usually get errors.

By default HL uses a desert sky, to change this go into the Map, Map Properties menu and enter the sky name in the Environment map bit. The HL .pak file contains different sky names that can be used - 2desert, alien1, alien2, alien3, black, city, cliff, desert, dusk, morning, neb1, neb2, neb6, neb7 etc.

Some HL mods also come with their own sky tex's, they're under the mods folder in gfxenv.

ttfn

So, just to make sure:

I create some crappy outside bridges and some trees, I put a large hollow cube around it and apply the sky-texture on that cube (on the inside) ?

I don't think I really got it ... it's probably quite simple ... but hey ... I'm from Belgium

What has that got to do with anything?

I must say though, your english is very good. better than many of my fellow american members (no offense intended to anyone)