My conclusion is it is the spawn delay that is causing the mobs to not activate on spawn. I created a set spawned by the same trigger, two with no delay and two with ten seconds, first activate the second don't :E 

isn't the auto-wake feature broken in quoth2? i know it definitely is for the horde spawner. 

This so far is the only time I've had trouble with it :E

The reason I've been using it so much at this stage is because when I first started mapping I didn't realise that triggering a monster woke it up, so I didn't know I could have everything in an external closet prespawned. I was learning how to build levels whilst working on this project so it's a huge mess of shit I know how to do better now :/ 

I thought that it was broken in the original release but the 2.1 patch fixed that.

If you could produce a minimal map which exhibits the issue that would be much easier to diagnose. 

It's a combination of the delay and telefragging. If a delayed mob telefrags one already spawned, then any other mobs triggered by the same action but yet to spawn (and other mobs spawning at the same time but NOT involved in the telefrag) no longer spawn alerted.

Now I'm aware of it it shouldn't be something too hard to get around, just means being less sloppy about creating spawn closets, but for you to observe it Preach:

http://www.zealousquakefan.com/junk/delaytest1.bsp 

So if you can guarantee that no telefrags occur, the alert-spawning will work fine?

Looking forward to your map, ZQF :-) 

This does explain why it was only affecting one fight, because of the three big fights I used different methods to make the closets :E 

I'll admit that I had been looking in the wrong place for a potential bug - I was checking the code for the info_multispawn and info_groupspawn for spawning lots of monsters from a single entity. This was a bad assump�tion on my part, as the monsters in the test map are regular monsters using the teleport spawnflags.

Looking in the correct place, it's a genuine and longstanding bug in Quoth. Delayed teleporting monsters ought to save the activator variable in the monster when first used and then restore it once the delay time has passed. Quoth neglects to do this and so the activator in the most recently handled event is applied to the monster!

Usually this is still the player and so the bug goes undetected. But if something else activates an event then the bug is exposed. In this case the telefrags set the telefragging monster to be the activator. Even though they are not activating the monsters, the code acts as if they were. There are of course other ways this bug could arise, but they are probably more obscure. Ah well... 

Is it possible to have so many entities that Quake C just starts to fall apart a bit? 

The most obvious way that too many entities can cause problems is if you spawn more than 600 on a standard engine. That causes an instant crash to console though, which is in my book not falling apart "a bit".

If you had enough monsters going at once you might be able to cause noticable framerate slowdown from the amount of ai being calculated, but I think on modern computers you'd be more likely to hit the former limit than the latter.

The most likely falling apart I think you'd see if hitting packet limits. Over a network the server has to send out packets of updates to each of the clients. If too much is happening at once, the packet becomes full before all the updates can be packed into it. This is called packet overflow.

When packet overflow occurs then sounds can fail to play, and entities or particles may not draw. It's worth noting that although this problem is rooted in the network code, it still occurs in single player. Standard engines still have a client and a server in a single player game, the packets just get sent internally. Fitzquake among others has more sophisticated handling to avoid this problem in the SP case.

Anything sounding like the issue? 

Not really. I was getting some odd behaviour (including the aggro issue) but after recompiling it went away again. The map has nearly 3000 entities, due to the monster sets between easy/normal and hard being almost completely different and a lot of relays and triggers and togglewalls etc.

Just a thought that I might be pushing it too far on having so much stuff trying to run at once... but it isn't actually causing any frame rate issues, so perhaps again just some flaws in the entity setup I haven't noticed yet. I'll keep quite until I've found something more concrete and reproducable. 

Uh, who's the activator in a logic gate? Here's a button that triggers a spikeshooter with two shootable triggers in front of it. First one is supposed to show a centerprint, and is killed at some point to let the spike pass through to the second one. No message is displayed. 

Ok, so the spike becomes the activator. Crap, now to add complicated workarounds. 

a common problem unfortunately :( 

play a global sound? 

Would like some suggestions on how this area could be lit and such. Going for an 'dark, cavernous and unused for years' kind of feel :E

http://www.zealousquakefan.com/images/base_ep/zqfbase_ep8.jpg 

strong but isolated spots casting tons of long spooooooooooooo... ...oooky shadows. 

http://magnarj.net/article_funclight.html 

Despite cavernous theme, put more light sources in? Especially along the main walkways. It's not lit well enough. Use delay 5 / wait 0.5 to make light reach further.

"Dark" doesn't work too well in Quake. You have to use pretty powerful light sources to get anywhere. In the end it is a game and the player has to be able to see something - it has to be functional.

Try using equipment as light sources, too - slipgate "powercubes", mobile light props, computer screens and so on.

Use spotlights.

You can also use e.g. candles and fire in base maps as light sources, you just have to make their presence look plausible. ^^

If all else fails, destroy the ceiling and let some sunlight in... only in certain places of course.

Crashed spaceship's thrusters as light sources / traps. Fire and debris. Burning barrels. Anything that gives off light (perhaps coloured) and looks plausible. A blaster test station. Laser traps. Car lights. 

that was posted by gb, @ zqf. Sorry. 

Is there a key for increasing the radius of a spot light? :E 

By radius I mean the radius of the cone they project :) 

angle? 

Doooh I'm a dumbass I tried _angle :p 

One tip which works from an engine point of view and is occasionally realistic too: you can make lots of your map dark and still playable if you light the floor. Entities like monsters take their lighting value from the floor below them. So if you need them visible but still want to create some contrasting dark areas of the map, make the floor the first thing you light.