Ambient sounds. Are there any technical limits or issues with them that would limit you from putting quite a few in, and is it possible to get rid of that wind noise when the player is near sky? 

yes, there are some limitations on ambient sounds. there is a hard limit on how many can be placed in a map. i believe this is 128.
other than that, it's the only way to get ambient sounds in the engine.
remember though, while 128 may seem like a lot, flames and torches all automatically start an ambient sound, so if you have a group of 4 or 5 flames, that's 4 or 5 ambients wasted, pretty much where a single ambient would have been fine.
and yes, you can get rid of the sky sound in two ways.
a) the shitty hack way is to just make the wind2.wav silent. this is not great since it affects all maps, not just one.
b) use the -noambientsky switch on aguirre's vis to disable the sound of sky. (-noambientwater will take off the water sound and -noambient takes off both)
you can even do this after a map has been compiled and full vised. just run vis again (with the completed state file still in the place) and it will update the sound effects. 

Ah cool. Pretty generous limit then really :) 

MAX_CHANNELS is 128 in standard engines.

But, it turns out you only get to use 116 of those channels for ambients, because there are 4 reserved channels for the hard-coded ambients (water,sky,slime,lava) and there are 8 "dynamic" channels used for pretty much every other sound in the game (gunfire, jump, pain, death, etc, etc.)

So you can have 116 of: torches, ambient_* and light_fluoro_buzz entities before you get an error about "MAX_CHANNELS".

Note, in Fitzquake 0.80+ (and derivatives), and in AguirRe's engines, and probably Darkplaces, the MAX_CHANNELS limit has been raised quite a bit. For example it's 512 in Fitzquake, with 128 dynamics, and 4 hard-coded ambients, leaving 380 channels for static sounds. 

If your level has many torches and flames and you're getting into the MAX_CHANNELS warnings, you can turn some of them into point func_illusionaries with a "model" "flame2.mdl" field and use a regular light entitiy for the brightness. This will creats a silent flame. It's useful in areas with several flames in close proximity where one sound is enough; or if they are so far away it wouldn't be heard by the player anyway. 

Nobody should need to do that hackery anymore today, unless you're mapping for DOSquake or something. 

 

There're still many people who play with Winquake or Glquake. If you're making a protocol 15 map, this is just another limitation to keep in mind. 

At my stage it'll probably be barely playable in Darkplaces because of high monster counts in several places, never mind vanilla Quake :)

But it's good to know for future reference. 

Was in AguirRe's engine at 666 - which is now fairly old. 

Does Fitzquake have a variable to increase the number of particles it'll display? Couple of areas with a fair few togglewall with particles on, which I think is stopping weapon fire from producing particles :E

Directq/RMQ not having the same problem. 

I think it's a commandline command. Or a console command. BUUUUUUT....:

I cant remember what it is....... 

 

hmm, what's the default value? :/ 

but i always use -particles 20000 which seems to be enough for dozens of explosions or gib trails. 

Is there a reason that info_notnull is commented out in quoths fgd? 

Because it allows you to make brush and point entities out of it without worldcraft complaining! It's a concession to hacks which really shouldn't be supported, but it's there now. 

Well, i uncommented it :p. I haven't had a need for any of the hacks that involve info_notnull brushes. If i do, i'll comment it out i suppose. 

so there hasn't been a solution to the issues with texture alignment with WC 3.3 yet right? If I were to open a map file in 1.6 and save it as an rmf, and then open it in 3.3, would that, by any chance, work? I know I should search for my answer, but meh. 

It would.

Because 1.6 saves in a basic format whilst 3.3 is the advanced one.

3.3 being a problematic texture format is only because no other editors bought into it. Functionally it works great, it's just not backwards compatible because of the closed source.

A solution would be reverting it to the simpler format. But to be honest, being able to rotate solids and have the textures do the same seems kind of minimal editor function now. 

Being id1 or 1997. 

And that the 'advanced' aspect of the texture offsets probably don't get used by standard QBSPs. 

Speaking as we are about Worldcraft anyway... 3D view crashes as soon as you change it's window size (taking the program with it). Kinda annoying cause means I can't maximise the display. Everything else seems okay. Thoughts?

Tried a quick reinstall but didn't help. 

Also you can try the Hammer 3.5 application, just download the .exe file and drop it into your WC DIR. Then make yourself a shortcut etc....

http://games.softpedia.com/get/Tools/Valve-Hammer-Editor.shtml

The only other thing tat might work is if you go Tools => Options => 3D Options => Uncheck 'filter textures' if present. 

Well, using hammer 3.5 seems to work but it's being really annoying about textures. I added them all in and it was fine but on restart it complained they were the wrong type of wad...