A lot of people are going to great lengths to hack in support for glass in the their levels, usually this requires setting water alpha or some other such thing and also using skip textures. And coupled with this much larger than normal polygons you will almost guarantee that a new engine is required.
So this begs the question, why go to all this trouble when the most popular engines support alpha brushes? I literally just found a post on inside3d saying fitzquake supported this, so does directq and RMQ...
I must have spent a good half-day this week trying to implement glass in a hacky way when I could have simply applied a key to determine the alpha of a brush.
Is there something I am missing here for all this hacking trouble? Why not just use an alpha key? 

Would be the biggest reason I suppose. The water "hack" works on all engines, whereas the .alpha key works on most, but not all.

The joys of custom Quake engines and all their different standards :D 

in RMQ, quakespasm, directq, fitzquake and darkplaces (afaik, untested but apparently it works).
It doesn't work in Quake Pro and Makaqu (and qbism by that extension).

I understand that it's a compatibility thing but if you use a texture with alpha then if your engine doesn't support it then at least you get a nice texture instead of a completely flat coloured surface. I seem to be missing the point in catering to bad engines with a bad solution.... 

would be awesome if you could set up a brush with a mirror in the exact same way you can set up a window. Coupled with transparency and coloured lighting you could effectively mimic Unreal. :P
(all we'd need after that would be uv motion textures and in-map skyboxes) 

I understand your concern for the wicked way to add glass in the Quake1 world.

I remember I was already glad to add a trigger_once with health 999 to propose the glass feeling of a space where there was nothing, but didn't let through.
Caught up in the old times of the QuakeLab on BBS in 1996.

I'm not a perfectionist and I'm sure there are lots of ways to use the alpha channel in a brush and tell the engine to add water_alpha 0.4
I think it's more like not suspecting an 18 year old engine with primary limitations can do things like that.
There's the console command, or the autoexec.bat for in use.

Also there is a slight feeling I get that in time of the quake area like medieval, glass was quiet a rare object.
It would be the same like wondering why the knights don't caugh frozen breath in icy environnements.

But I won't break you up in your search to engine upgrading, that was not my intention. 

You make a good point about glass in Medieval periods however the Wizard, Stucco and perhaps the Base levels (although I'd rather do the Hipnotic \ Custents Force Field effects if given the choice on Base levels) all have window textures in the original levels so the idea of glass is already there so it may not be all that out of line with the environment.

Besides that it's supposed to be another world with some familiar aspects relative to Earth so a little bit of mix and match is to be expected.

Or maybe U;m over thinking it... 

...whatever. Note the icon. 

Post #3923 worked perfectly for a switchable trigger_teleport entity I wanted. I seriously hope you got the essence of that post on your site.

Also is it possible to safely kill a monster_jump entity with a killtarget on a trigger_once? Is there a way to stop the touch function of the monster_jump entity and then kill the entity next frame? I am looking for a map hack solution. 

That's a bit of an out of date method, the following post has a much more concise way of achieving the same thing:
http://tomeofpreach.wordpress.com/2012/11/18/mid-map-entity-spawning/
And yes, you can safely kill a monster_jump to turn it off, it's just a pity there isn't a way to toggle one instead. 

Works like that in schism, thanks to the precache insight. They have separate precache functions that are called from their classname, and I'm still not sure I understand how it works.

Gb did the work, based on Preach's stuff. Now much later I'm using it for splitting tar babies and enforcers spawning their own defense drones... 

Did not know that. So I can trigger a trigger mid map using vanilla progs! 

I think the RMQ monster spawning was based on Scourge of Armagon, Drake and some of Necros' stuff in Chapters.

Not sure how much Chapters / Quoth has taken from Scourge of Armagon, but I reckon SoA was the first mod to do the monster spawning stuff.

I believe there is some SoA and also some custents in Quoth, or at least in Chapters.

By the way, some of that code is horrible, especially where it clones an entity. There are engine extensions MUCH more effective for that purpose... and faster. But it depends on the target engine. 

... just like entity alpha. :-p 

The original spawning code borrowed very heavily from hipnotic.

I used custents for that first map I made. It's a great mod with a lot of interesting things in it, but you are better of picking and choosing things from it rather than using the whole package because there is so many things you probably won't need.
it's also a great mod to see some things that are not in stock progs.dat and can give you some ideas for other things like the mechs and security cameras, or the new gun. 

I'm stumped on this.
So I've made a light entity and pointed it to a info_null with targetname "pointsun".
It's got the _color and _sun tags set. No spawnflags.

At first it flat out refused to work, and now suddenly it turned into a big pulsating light out of nowhere? What the hell am I doing wrong? 

Okay, apparently I had something else pointing to it. It's a sunlight now, but it's still flickering. I thought vanilla Q3BSP didn't support lightstyles? 

Hmmm, seems like a compiler fluke in the generated shaders. No idea how this got in here.

// Q3Map2 custom lightstyle stage(s)
{
map $lightmap
blendFunc GL_SRC_ALPHA GL_ONE
rgbGen wave noise 0.5 1 0 5.37 // style 32
tcGen lightmap
tcMod transform 1 0 0 1 0.00000 0.50000
}

Bah, that took too long to fix :( 

Use a sky shader for sunlight. :) 

I know RMQ engine supports masked textures (to make fences and such), but which other engines support it? 

DirectQ. 

And FTE, I just checked. 

I had a look anyway after I posted. It seems this is a standard feature of RMQ and anything that forked from fitz after a certain point. 

Yeah, using sunext and skylight now with all the bells and whistles :) 

While waiting on the Quoth update. I'm thinking of doing a DM map. I want bot support because I don't DM. What would be the best bot to use? I want to use waypoints. 

Has a nice waypoint system.

You build it in-game by placing points then dump it to an external .way file that you bundle with the level.