Just out of curiosity.....

#1 I don't know, maybe you missed that part.
But it is covered in Chapter 3 of the Torque Shader Engine Documentation.

Reread this Chapter and take a look at the TSE Demo Scripts mentioned in there (materials.cs, materialMap.cs etc.). I'm sure you will see the way to go.

There's also a good FAQ on exactly that topic. Alex described the hole process. Maybe this is the best point to start.

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#3 I think you are talking about the Photoshop plugin and Melody.
It should work fine for ATI cards. This tools just create normal maps trom a texture or a model. They don't do anything when you start Torque. The texture works on ATI and Nvidia cards.

Nvidia Photoshop Plugin
Nvidia Melody

#4 Another pretty popular tool to generate normal maps is ORB.

As far as I know, Melody and ORB are easier and faster to use than any other freely available similar tool.

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#6 I actually tried melody but couldn't get anything useful out of it, was a pain in the ass overall for me. ORB worked great though, no issues, everything was easy :D

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#8 The ShaderX series of books is pretty nice. I own both shaderX^2 books. I think the shader X^3 book is out too.

Another book: The Cg Tutorial: The definitive guide to programmable real-time graphics. This book is a good introduction to shaders and even though it teaches you writing shaders with cg, the equivalent hlsl shaders are the same as the cg ones. I think nvidia and microsoft designed cg and hlsl cooperatively which is why it is the same.

You can find a lot of shaders around in the web (not sure about tutorials though but I bet you can find a dry reference of either language), look for either cg or hlsl tutorials or even both since cg is compatible with hlsl.

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#11 Cg shaders can indeed be used with ATI cards as well. Basically what happens, is that the .cg file is compiled into assembly (usually at runtime or you can do it offline and just add the .asm shaders). Currently TSE does not support cg, and I doubt it ever will since the staff has some good concerns about cg. The thing though is that the cg language is compatible with the hlsl one so you can read cg tutorials to write hlsl shaders.

About quark and such, I have no idea. You should read the TSE docs, they teach you how to apply materials and shaders.

http://www.garagegames.com/docs/tse/general/

Read the Materials and Shaders sections.

#12 Cg in _theory_ works on ATI. In practice, nVidia "doesn't have any ATI cards that they test against." Which is why we're a bit leery about making it a key part of our tech. :)

All of the shader languages are very similar as they all address similar hardware in similar ways. Knowledge from one is pretty easy to move over to another, and the basic techniques in terms of getting a desired graphic effect are identical across them all.

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