Brief Update
My development box has a case of the 'water cooling system not working properly' - It's going to be replaced by a Thermaltake Frio and some 88CFM aluminum fans (all probably, realistically, much louder and more power-consumptive than the current setup) all so that my CPU temperature runs less than a deadly fever.
The model translations and lighting work well; I'm working on a simple way to animate points (this is required for several things: torches, candles, smoke, etc.) but I'm royally screwing it up trying to modulate the point size and adjust the texture position on the fly. Someone message me and tell me to just keep the point the same size and move it semirandomly around a set of flame images - thus creating the pulse and waggle of a fire.
Or not, whichever. Either way, you'll get models soon enough, then player models.