Irrlicht Engine

Is there an easy way to put a static mesh into a BSP and then have it load in Irrlicht?

Yeah, either create the mesh seperatly and add it as a scene node if you are going to need to move the object or anything like that, or you could add it to the BSP file if it is going to do sod all. You can add it with the BSP writers that are around. One comes with Q3, there's GKRadiant a few others if you look on websites like PlanetQuake.

I still can't get it to work.
I'm trying have a light fixture in my map.
I created a 3DS light bulb and place it in my map in GtkRadiant. It shows up, I have a copy of the light in the appropriate model folder for Quake3. I replicate the folder structure from where I put my prog (structure works for textures in the map). When I run my Irrlicht prog, no model of the light bulb shows up?

Any help is most appreciated

I wasn't aware that you could add a 3DS mesh to a BSP map, I don't know that much about that format but AFAIK it would compile the mesh as part of the BSP mesh. Why don't you just model the whole map in a different mesh format, .X is supported by the engine. There's a plugin for 3DS MAX for you to export to .X. There aren't any advantages to using BSP because you can't load entities from the format, it just uses it as another mesh.

yeah, when the BSP is compiled it just has an "entity" marker and records the location of the model to insert - it doesn't actually include the geometry of the model as far as I know.

If I modelled the map using the .x format - wouldn't I lose the advantage of speed associated with an octree to easily cull unseen geometry?
i.e. if the map was the size of a normal Quake3/halflife/RTCW map wouldn't modelling it as .x make the whole thing run too slowly as it would have to draw the entire .x file - even though half of it was behind the camera for example?

1. You can't load entities from BSP in Irrlicht.
2. You can perform OctTree exactly the same on a .X mesh as you could a BSP mesh ( since BSP is just loaded as one big mesh ).