some info about quake weapons:
http://shoresofnis.wordpress.com/2010/10/12/on-quake-weapons/ 

This is exactly what I was hoping to find, plus your conclusions from the stats. It's in my bookmarks, now. :) 

i do like that iD included a room clearing weapon without making it stupidly overpowered like Doom�s BFG.

My current playing around with slaughter maps I concluded that the main advantage of the BFG in a zerg situation is that the BFG is zero risk. The RL has a huge splash radius and is very painful. I considered giving out battlesuits like candy but it feels pretty bleh and is an invitation for the player to just rocket jump around like a lunatic which isn't what I had in mind. The BFG in Doom is like a shotgun, and at anything other than medium range the BFG is actually pretty shit, and the RL is much better. 

Oh I agree a lot on your idea of making the LG pass through enemies. It would make it the proper super weapon it should be, rather than just feeling like another nailgun with different ammo :p

<Begs for Quoth 3 lawl> 

anything other than medium range

um, anything *beyond* rather :E 

ruins has penetrating lightning. does full damage on up to 3 targets in a row. :)
also, when you get the SNG, the NG isn't selected during cycle up and cycle down and pressing 4 will select the SNG instead of the NG (pressing 4 twice gives you the NG).

and the fast zombies allows bullets and nails to penetrate as well, but nails 'start falling' after going through the first target so it ends up being maybe max of 5 or 6 zombies you can get with one nail if you aim upwards at the first zombie's head. 

also, when you get the SNG, the NG isn't selected during cycle up and cycle down and pressing 4 will select the SNG instead of the NG (pressing 4 twice gives you the NG).
And I got utterly confused and thought I had a bug.

Please do not do things like this. Some people (me) rely on weapon cycle to quickly select the weapon they want. If I know what weapons I have I can easily switch between them by using the wheel X times. 

I agree with Spirit on that one. Sometimes, believe it or not, I like to use the NG even if I do have the SNG, for weak targets or to conserve ammo. It's easier to waste ammo with the SNG by over-shooting a target. 

Just tap fire it? :E 

 

I'm not so sure myself, maybe it is OK to customise the way the weapons work in your own mod. 

that's unfortunate. :(
maybe better documentation was in order, but i like the new system too much to change it. :x

frankly, i find it far more annoying when someone makes a mod with the older progs sources (not 1.06) which don't have a cycle back impulse as i tend to use that solely for weapon selection. 

I am working on a map with some portions outside a spaceship... hence no gravity is required.
Having no gravity can be easily achieved using sv_gravity, but the player cannot move on Z-axis unfortunately... I though one moment fly mode will solve the issue but it didn't work either.

Actually I'd like to obtain equivalent behavior as noclip (in term of X-Y-Z acis move capabilities) but not passing through walls ? Is that possible ? 

i'm thinking you could do something similar to the fake water effect.

first to understand how the engine works:

quake first runs water physics on the player and only checks if the player is actually IN water afterwards.
AND
the variables that tell the engine that the player is in water can be changed via qc.

so, as long as you set the player's .waterlevel is set to 3, the engine thinks the player is swimming.

this allows you to move in all three axis. the problem is that, you also need to set the player's personal gravity (not sv_gravity) to 0 (or 0.001 since 0 defaults to 1) via the .gravity variable.
this will give you a perfect swimming physics effect. unfortunately, swimming physics has the sinking effect so you need to cancel that out somehow without stopping the player from manually swimming downwards.

note however that all this code must be done before physics are run by the engine. this means it either has to go in a touch function or in the playerPreThink function (NOT playerPostThink).

also, water physics has a lot of 'drag' on the player that causes them to stop moving quickly. so that would have to be worked around as well. 

I learned to map on worldcraft.

Now I want to learn to map for q1 using radiant style editors. Google reveals myriad versions of this thing, qeradiant, gtkradiant, netradiant, and others... I am confused.

So, my new dumb question is this: To map for quake 1 in the optimal radiant-based editor, where do I begin? 

i believe the only up to date versions of radiant for q1 are either gtkradiant 1.5 or sikkpin's QE3.

gtkr 1.5 is the version that works natively for quake. they changed some controls in 1.5 from 1.4 (making 1.5 inferior, imo). it's possible but slightly hacky to use 1.4 and use a q2->q1 .map converter.

Sikkpin's QE3 is basically gtkr 1.5 but without the retarded control setup. it does have a few annoying bugs, but they are consistent and aren't anything that can't be worked around. there's nothing that will corrupted your whole map, but, for example, if you have multiple point entities selected and you undo an operation on them, all but one of them will be converted into brushes the same size as the entity was.

if you want to give sikkpin's QE3 a shot, you can get the latest version here:
http://shub-hub.com/files/tools/qe3.1.0.5beta.zip
it's a little finicky to get set up because you have to set some directory info manually in text files, iirc.
there's a long thread here: http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=60225 for it, but just bump it if you have questions.

supposedly, baker was going to take a look at the QE3 source and make some fixes and such, but that was a long time ago.
at least the source is available, but there doesn't seem to be much interest in it. wish i understood it, personally (or could even get it to compile!). 

netradiant can also be used for q1 and is slightly more up to date than 1.5.

The UI of 1.5 is a question of taste, I prefer it for example.

Another radiant question:

Textures on rotated faces sometimes show up correctly in radiant but not in game; has one of the radiant users here found a solution for it besides manually realigning those textures? 

Also, has someone successfully compiled sikkpin's qe3 on linux, or is this another lazy port? 

I would like to stick to Quoth mod without having to compile any qc stuff (as I am definitely not an expert).. but your idea sounds good as I thought exactly the same yesterday night... so ideally outside the spaceship would be invisible water.. hence player:
- can move X-Y-Z axis without any issue (zero gravity emulation)
- will suffocate after some time without proper suit

Now the issue is how to make water invisible and how to remove the water effect ingame (i.e removing the distorsion effect when "swimming")
I think skip tool can be used for first issue (as far as I remember Metlslime provided "waterskip" texture to remove water surface, Metlsilime would be cool if he can confirm ;)... I have to experiment this). And for second issue I remember it is possible to remove the water distorsion effect, but on this I need help as I can't recall the command ;) 

Skip would remove the water texture from the surfaces. There is still the screen tint though.

Making the water an entity and setting alpha = 0.1 would make it totally transparent I think... in engines that support entity alpha.

r_wateralpha = 0.1 might also work?

r_waterwarp, IIRC, does the underwater warp. Try setting that to 0? 

Thanks for the tips: I'll try them ;)

And indeed remains the water tint "issue"... not really a big deal actually as FitzQuake supports r_wateralpha.. Maybe it would be cool to apply it only to water, that would prevent to have a global wateralpha value for all the map... hmmm, I need to think about this..

Anyway, thanks a lot for your help necros and gb, you rock ! ;) 

WTB an engine/mod/whatever that removes those annoying graphical tints and instead adds the HUD icon of the powerup in the screen corner with a countdown like an RPG does.

A: it can really mess up visibility if you have these strong effects over the screen (see Quoth Battlesuit)

B: It's irritating not seeing the actual duration of the powerup you are using, and the 3 second fade warning is often not long enough if you're trying to design a sequence where the player has to use multiple powerups (say an area with a respawning Quad or an extended underwater sequence where the player needs to find biosuits). 

Displaying the time remaining on a powerup would be an easy qc hackjob, at least. Not sure about engine side.

I made a mod that displayed health next to the crosshair once. You can display all sorts of things in there. 

OK, using waterskip and water for zero gravity emulation is working fine.... except I still have two problem to solve:

1/ Water tint is still present despite wateralpha set to 0
=> Is it possible to remove it and make water as transparent as space emptiness ?

2/ Still remains the sounds coming from the water (e.g player jumping in water = plouf, player moving up, etc...)
=> Is there a way to remove them (and preserve suffocating noise that is interesting ;)

I hope some cvars/command/sv/gl stuff can be of use here...

Thnaks a lot in advance.. 

if there's no other water in the map, you could replace the sounds...

i did this kind of thing in ne_tower, for example. just run it as a mod of a mod (so for fitzquake, you'd run with -quoth -game jplmod instead of dumping all your files into the quoth directory (dp would be -game quoth -game jplmod)).

it's a cheap way to do it, but it works. :P