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! 

Put a few (one may even be enough already) light entities close to the bottom and give them "mangle" "0 -90 0" and "wait" ".1". The light value determines how bright the models are, so you'll want to make sure it matches the surround areas. Note that the lighting will only affect models within a 1024(?) distance; everything above will still be black.

Important: if the void is made of sky, you also need to put a solid brush (with upscaled textures!) inside of the bottom sky brush, because sky alone can't be lit. Needless to say, you need to ensure the sky volume is big enough so that the projectiles can disappear correctly even with the solid brush inside. 

In some of the QdQ movies, there are outtakes where monsters spontaneously become indestructible - they can't be killed by gunfire, grenades bounce off of them, hitting them with the axe makes a stone sound, and the genocide cheat does nothing.

In the map I'm working on right now, this weird bug seems to affect the monsters almost every time the map is played. Even stranger: it affects only ogres, including flak ogres, and it affects them regardless of whether they are present in the map from the start or spawned in.

For the moment I've worked around the problem by giving all the ogres identical killtargets and targetnames, which causes them to be removed from the map when their HP hits zero, but I REALLY don't want to complete and release the map that way. For one thing it looks silly and disconcerting (they just DISAPPEAR without animating or playing a death sound) and for another it affects the ammo balance in a way I really don't like.

Any ideas? 

I thought it might be a joequake/qdqstats related bug, but it happens in winwarp too :/ 

Which mod are you using? Do they have any non-standard spawnflags? Does it also happen in Fitzquake as well? 

thanks for the help as usual! 

It's not something I know the answer to off the top of my head but I would like to try and debug it. Can you send me either the whole map or enough of it that the bug is easy to reproduce? 

negke:
1) just Quoth
2) spawnflags vary between cases, which is part of what makes it so weird.
3) It happens in FitzQuake every time just like the other engines

Preach:
I'd love to send it but I'd rather not post it. Got an email address?

FWIW the problem seems to appear pretty regularly when the ogres are hit with quad damage and to almost disappear when I take out the quad. I really wanted that quad secret because it's an awesome area for one, but I might just replace it with something more tepid like a cross. :P 

n/t 

I forgot we even HAD profiles. 

Wondering why the bug almost always appeared when Quad damage was enabled and very rarely otherwise, I experimented a little further and figured something out. I was using the "remove head gibs" Quoth optimization and ogres became immortal instead of gibbing. Severed heads are back in and now they die like decent monsters. Maybe it's just a bug in Quoth itself (related to the ogre models now being merged?) that no one noticed because no one bothered to have ogres, quad, and optimized gibbing in the same part of one map before :P

Preach, feel free to disregard the email, or laugh at how much my map sucks. your call. 

That makes it very easy to investigate, and even without running your map I can see how to fix that. I think the ogre must have been the first monster tested with the flag, and it has a single vestigal line of code which no other monster has. So I've fixed this bug (and a related one where eliminators would still precache their head mode even with this flag set). It's now in a potential 2.2 patch for BUG FIXES ONLY.

I say potential because it might be worth holding on until a more severe bug comes to light, before going to the trouble of getting everyone to get a patch. The 2.1 patch fixed an unavoidable crashing bug in an existing map, and this is the only change in 2.2. If anyone has any good crashing bugs in Quoth 2.1 now's the time to share! Fern: let me know if it's impossible to get the map to run on a stock engine without that optimisation, as that would probably sway me. 

And I really had no good reason to enable the optimization in the first place, so overall using this experience as an excuse for a patch seems unnecessary. Thanks for your attention though. It's not every day you find a reproducible bug in software everyone's been using with satisfaction for years. :) 

if you're going to do a patch, it might be nice to fix the bug with multispawners and auto-awake monsters. 

Which way round was it broken? It was failing to wake monster with the flag set, right? Not waking everyone without the flag 

yeah, basically nothing happens when you turned on the setting. They would spawn in one at a time, but because they weren't awake, only the first would spawn and the spawner would wait until the space was free before spawning again. 

FitzQ .85 - is it possible to slow the frame rate down by some command? I have an effect that doesn't quite look right and I want to slow it down so that I can see what's happening. (Intel i7 is just too damn quick!) 

This is the multicore timing bug. The only way to fix it is to use a different engine afaik. Quakespasm is a good alternative. :) 

...me trembles with fear...

Wish me luck, and if I don't return I leave my goldfish to Mildred, and my conkers to Jeremy. 

Mike, if you just want to turn on slow motion for testing purposes, the command you are looking for is:

host_framerate.

I find that setting it to 0.002 gets me a slowmo which I can study animations by, but my understanding is that the appropriate setting varies depending on the computer (so you couldn't use it to make good a bullet-time powerup) 

My bacon is saved, and I get to keep my conkers after all. Thanks Preach. 

Oh sorry, I misunderstood when you mentioned the i7. :)
You can also try host_timescale which is in fitzquake engines only. 0.5 is half speed, 1.0 (or the default 0) is full speed.