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I have tried several times today with adding a shadowvolume to one of my objects but it does not show up at all, neither in the game nor ZE.

First, I made a very simple and closed mesh called "shadowvolume" and put it inside my model (as a child of the main mesh), branch selected everything as usual and saved. Then I loaded all objects with collison in ZE, had my lights on DIR with shadows on, burned the terrain, saved and munged. The Pandemic objects cast their usual shadows but not my own piece. I have tried both to have the shadowmesh hidden or unhidden - makes no difference.

Also, even though the shadowmesh was smaller than the main-mesh and not visible in any way if I kept it unhidden - it made the real mesh lose some UV-information, even though the main mesh is exactly as before. Or perhaps it was simply visible through the main mesh, but that should be impossible since all its vertices were safely inside the main mesh. The normals are correctly angled.

What you have to do is create a parameter (if im nto mistaken) and the shadowvolume has to be hidden.

Yep, jabba's right, you forgot the last part. This is from art_guide.doc:

4. Select the shadowvolume mesh.
5. In the Animate menu, select Create -> Parameter -> New Custom Parameter.
6. In the dialogue box, rename the Parameter Name to shadowvolume. Uncheck the Animatable Characteristic Button.
7. Hide the shadowvolume mesh before export

what is the Shadowvolume for anyways?

its name says it all, its a mesh for casting shadows. >_>

okay.... so if it weren't there - it would have no shadows?

and I thought volume meant 'filling' >.>

volume is the space that mass occupies.

Thanks Squipple for that clear answer.
Now I will embark on adding the missing Shadowvolumes of my map.

The missing UV's on my model were due to the fact that I had somehow two clusters with identical polys - so when I removed the unused cluster the texture was back to normal.