An often occurring problem when designing scenery is that your object shows with black (or no) textures. There can be many causes for this. For example a  texture that is not a power of two in size, a texture that is in the 24 bit BMP format that FS can not read or just a texture that you forgot to copy to the right texture folder.

Recently I discovered another reason for black textures (and this one took me a little while to figure out). When you apply a bump map to a material, but the polygons that use the material do not have a normal set you will also get black textures. So this is another one to remember when such problems occur again.