With the deadline extended (and now being capable of using other orifices than my mouth to breath .. not counting my nose yet) i'm back in the habit:
rewrote how the light is calculated, previously it just picked up the light from the lightmap
but now it actually takes the lights position (up to 4 lights) into account for vertex lighting (previously it was a single fixed directional light only)
in the end it looks nice but the the difference is hardly noticeable
.. also smoke is now affected by light as well