Screenie showing models in the 3D view complete with bounding box (shambler and torch visible)

http://i.imgur.com/GTHgc.jpg 

I'll try it out. Is it possible to have dialog boxes similar to Gimps "dockable dialogs" (boxes outside of the main window). That would be great for editing with 2 monitors. Any editors do that? I think it would be great to have the visual representation on one monitor the 4 views and the nuts and bolts entities, textures... on the other. 

What are efrags and should I be concerned if my map goes over the limit? Fitzquake seems ok with it and gives me a warning, but the warning appears after the map has loaded instead of before like the surf limits etc. 

"Too many efrags!"

This console warning is normally caused by having entities (typically torches) too close to or
even partly inside solid walls. Another possibility is too many (or too far apart) brushes that
are included in one brush entity. EFrags means Entity Fragments. Enhanced Win/GLQuake has higher limits. 

Thanks for that. I should have checked the compiler tips, since it was helpful last time and I'm assuming that's where you found that info. Sorry for being lazy :) 

It's indeed 'fragmented' entities like when you put all details in a room in a single func. The efrags count increases especially fast when doing this with func_illusionaries. Use devstats to keep track of current number.
Also note that clients handle efrags differently - older ones are usually more picky about it than e.g. Fitzquake and may constantly spam the console if the limit is exceeded. 

I always place torches 4 units inside the walls because I don't like the look of 'floating' torches, which is what you get by placing the torch's bounding-box flush to a wall.

My current map has hundreds of torches placed like this and does not report the efrag error.

Mind you, I do get:-
33744 marksurfaces
8808 signon buffer
64 lightmaps
1257 byte packet
343 visedict

at map loading, and in game at one point I get:-

36 blights
601 edicts

...but it plays fine :) 

I don't think the torches-in-wall explanation is correct anyway. Best torch placement is where the origin of the torch is 2-4 units away from the wall, yeah. Certain areas may require to set the light level of the actual torch entity to 1, and use a point light several units in front of it. There's absolutely no reason to have floating torches or flames in a map - even through there are editors that only show them as boxes, it's all just the laziness of some mappers not to place them properly.

Mike, don't be lazy yourself and go optimize the map for vanilla limits. With those marksurfaces and edicts counts, it looks very possible to do that. 

I'm pretty hazy on the exact working of efrags but I can see they are about entities straddling multiple leaves in the bsp tree. I wonder if tweaking the torch model to have a 4 unit offset would avoid the problem. On the one hand that would fix it if efrags were generated by entity bounding boxes crossing leaf boundaries. On the other hand, the efrag code seems to be in the rendering portion of the engine so maybe it's the model bounds rather than the entity bounds which matter. In that case moving the model instead of the entity does exactly nothing... 

I can confirm it is the model bbox not the ent bbox which counts. Please disregard that suggestion. 

"Don't be lazy", well, as I am sure you know, it is not a case of being lazy; it is a case of mapping for my pleasure, not other peoples. If you ever see this map, you will understand why it is not meant for vanilla Quake, and will not be worth bringing inside the original limits. The original map was over 20,000 brushes with 700 monsters, and covered the full 4096 x 4096 area. I had already cut it down and released FMB_BDG a few years ago and what I have left is the balance.

Besides which, weren't the compilers and engines enhanced just so we could 'break' the limits? Otherwise, there was no point!

Anyway, don't worry, I know what you mean ;) 

~690 at the moment, and I have a lot of large funcs. I can probably reduce them a bit as I've nearly finished the map now, but I wonder if I'll be able to reduce them enough. I'll do some tests tonight to remove the largest func_illusionaries.

Aside from that, it's just clipnodes and marksurfs that are over. No way in hell I can lower marksurfs enough to bring it under the limit without spending a massive amount of time removing detail, but clipnodes should be easy enough, since there are lots of arches and small details in the map.

God I'll be glad when this pos map is finally finished and I can forget about it at last :/ 

I think I recall seeing marksurfaces actually DROP when converting func_s to world geometry. 

Not too hard to imagine if the func and the world intersect or overlap, as both sets of brushes would get faces culled, which might offset any extra splits. 

anyone know if a trigger once can start disabled, be triggered by another entity to become active, then trigger normally by the player? 

But we had that in the RMQ progs 

no, but:
http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=4&start=4469&end=4469

(trigger_changelevel does have that functionality though; set 'startdisabled' to '1') 

terrible idea but it might work 

I noticed the changelevel had that functionality, but didn't try using it as a trigger. In the end I used two func_breakables for what I wanted to do. Doesn't do the same thing exactly, but it does what I want to do now.

Thanks for changelevel tip though. Will try that if I need to later. 

you are very welcome to slap those things into the wiki at quaddicted so one does not have to search for post 12765 in thread 124, eg http://www.quaddicted.com/tools/mapping_tricks or something 

Looking for a way to stop nails and rockets. Working on an idea, I have enemies placed outside their sight range. I would like to keep the player from hitting them. Anyway to block rockets without having them explode? (using Quoth) 

try a trigger_void... that should work. obviously though, it'll have to be placed in a way such that no monster touches it. it also needs to be wide enough to catch a fast moving rocket (otherwise it'll be on one side of it in frame 1 and on the other side of it on frame 2 and never register the touch). 

trigger_void did the job 

I have a few areas of void in my map and I need to make sure that the bottom of the void is lit bright enough to see flying enemies as they pass over it. I have a few problems:

1. how do I set the angle of the light cone? I looked in the light manual and found the option _softangle, but I haven't tried it yet. I want to set the cone angle to 180 so that the light will only illuminate what's below it.

2. I want the void to be black, but it's grey if I use a black sky texture or the void skybox. This is really annoying. I can use black polygons and it will look black if I don't put any light there, but I need *some* light to illuminate scrags etc.

I'm going to have a play around and see if I can get it working properly, but if anyone knows this stuff off the top of their head then please let me know! 

I have a few areas of void in my map and I need to make sure that the bottom of the void is lit bright enough to see flying enemies as they pass over it. I have a few problems:

1. how do I set the angle of the light cone? I looked in the light manual and found the option _softangle, but I haven't tried it yet. I want to set the cone angle to 180 so that the light will only illuminate what's below it.

2. I want the void to be black, but it's grey if I use a black sky texture or the void skybox. This is really annoying. I can use black polygons and it will look black if I don't put any light there, but I need *some* light to illuminate scrags etc.

I'm going to have a play around and see if I can get it working properly, but if anyone knows this stuff off the top of their head then please let me know!