Good to know. Thought it was my fault! 

Has a newer version in testing at the moment with a lot of fixes and improvements. 

are youre choice at last... 

would something like this chart and an explanation be helpful?
The rotation stuff seems under used and understood.

http://www.mediafire.com/view/57cfzc2e615m5z9/testchart.jpg 

I'm getting charty with it!

I'm starting to do some data analysis tests for Quake gameplay. I've done a first run through of one of my old favorite maps (hip2m2 if your curious) to get an idea of some basic ideas.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/c6kcbe24129idf1/BlackCathedralStats.jpg

I'm attempting to create generalizations about the basic gameplay elements over time. This is only the results from one study, but I had to pause to write the data down every interval. Also, copying the output from the console is tedious if I were to try to improve the collection method by outputting the data every 30 or 60 secs to the conole. Is there an engine that supports exporting data in this manner? Maybe in the save file?

I can make some generalizations though (still this depends on play style and it would be nice to have others input their data for this study). Kills over time is almost perfectly linear at about 12 kills per minute or 5 seconds per kill. Shells and nails maintain the same average (44 for this particular map), but nails varies much more wildly than shells (okay so I use them more but who wouldn't). Rockets maintained a very low average hovering around 10-15.

The linear kills over time is to me the most useful tidbit so far that I've learned and gives me a good idea of this maps pace, although being able to see the balance of everything over time like this makes me giddy. :D I love charts!!

Is there a better way to automate this? 

You could record yourself playing/take demos, and gather the data later. Never peeked inside a demo file before, possible it's in there and could be plucked out. 

I've created a map and everything is sealed, but for some reason when I play the map it's bright though the worldspawn brightness is set to default, which should be at 0. Can anyone help and tell me what's causing this? 

otherwise it would completely fullbright

and don't forget to run light.exe 

Use QW and then cokeman's mvdparser. You can specify what information you want in the output with templates. Should be possible to get pickups etc. from it.

https://github.com/JoakimSoderberg/mvdparser

I used it for https://www.quaddicted.com/tools/frag_heat_maps_from_mvd_demos

There are also tools for protocol 15 demos but I haven't found a user-friendly one. Will probably be investigating them later this month. The SDA guys should have stuff. Maybe http://speeddemosarchive.com/quake/qdq/tools/demtool.html 

Are you using the newest tyr tools for light and vis?

It's possible VIS broke somehow. In Quake turn "r_showtris 1" in console and just make sure that the whole level isn't being rendered at one time, which may indicate something doing wrong at compile time.

This is assuming you're running light.exe and have some lights thrown about in the map, which is what to check first. 

Ok thanks. Yea something broke and I got the idea to try different compile tools and that fixed it. 

It's like spy said. Light.exe adds the lightmap information to the compiled bsp provided there are light entities in the map. 

If a moving brush entity, e.g. a func_train, is being blocked by a player or a monster, does this affect the behavior of other entities riding it in any way? Technically, it's still in a "moving" state, right? Would that impact on any active/inactive monsters on it, specifically their movement/AI routines? 

Seen anything like that, especially with trains. Typically they affect nothing and nothing affects them apart from a direct targeting and the obvious movement of creatures placed on top.

The only oddity I've seen there is with dead monsters, who'll sometimes slide on horizontally moving trains, and doors.

It's possible however that a mover is doing damage to a creature (even if it's 0 damage) which in theory could interrupt / reboot it's state.

Just conjecture / vague memory though. 

I am trying to get my maps to work with Darkplaces and I have setup all my bmodels (doors, buttons) with skip on their hidden surfaces. I have been using your newskip.exe program to move the skip surfaces around inside of the bsp, but strange things are happening.

Projectiles often fall through the bmodels with skip surfaces and traceline functions cannot recognize the objects anymore. If I compile without the newskip.exe the bmodels are all fine. I checked that the objects have the correct bbox and min/max setup but I cannot see what is wrong.

What exactly does newskip.exe do? I want to be able to explain to LordHavoc so that I can log a bug with him about Darkplaces and hopefully get the situation fixed. I really want to keep the skip surface function but I need to get more details. Can you help? 

basically skip tool will re-arrange the faces in the leaf or bmodel so that the skip faces are at the end of the list, then it changes the "num faces" count to be lower.

so if you start with this:

NumFaces: 6
Faces: A B C D E F

And B and C are skip-textured, you get this at the end:

NumFaces: 4
Faces: A D E F B C

So B and C are still included in the list, but won't get drawn because the engine will stop after drawing the first 4 faces.

Also the source code is included in the newskip archive, so Lordhavoc should be able to look at it in more detail if he wants to. 

thanks :) 

I thought it deleted the faces. That explains why newskipped bsps when loaded into another map as a .model still render all of their faces even when loaded by themselves they don't render. (Yeah I was playing around with the idea of instancing (you know like source engine!) multiple bsp's which works almost perfectly but would be absolutely horrid for performance in my case since skipping doesn't work. That and you get fireflies between mating surfaces of zero thickness (think tri-soup where two brushes only share an edge)); 

Wait how does the engine render entity .model's like for monsters and brush entities? Is there a way to have a skip utility that causes certain faces of a bsp to have the pink index color of transparency applied to them? 

The latest tyr-qbsp removes skip surfaces completely during compilation (instead of hiding them at the end of the surface list) in case that helps. 

Interesting, I didn't consider that use case when creating the tool. It should be possible to support it, though tyranns new absolute kind of makes my tool obsolete. 

"Absolute" should read "qbsp" -- cursed iPad autocorrect 

Darkplaces doesn't treat skip surfaces as simply tranpsarent faces by default like normal engines. Instead, to DP it's pretty much like they aren't there, so shots pass through and they don't block visibility. Check the sv_gameplayfix_q1bsptraceline* cvars, they can revert this behavior. 

i wish skip worked on external bsps. that would be radddddd 

Sounds like tyr's does?