Thanks guys! 

I would like to have the player start with no shells and the axe selected.

My attempt: I thought the easiest way of doing this was to have console run the command "give shells," but I could not get that command to execute from a .cfg file.

Is there a way to complete this task without compiling with QuakeC? 

Yes. 

Make an 'info_notnull' entity underneath the player start.

Add the following keys and values:

"think" "PlaceItem"
"nextthink" "0.2"
"touch" "BackpackTouch"
"ammo_shells" "-25"

This basically makes an invisible backpack item, like monsters or deathmatch opponents would drop, and contains -25 shells. 

You don't need to do all that if the player is sure to have only the shotgun and axe and 25 ammo. 

 

I was able to implement this within 5 minutes of the post.

Is there a way to suppress the pickup sound? 

 

if the info_notnull is right on top of the player such that they pick it up as soon as the map starts, does the sound still play? 

 

and no-one can hear him. Is he still wrong? 

I keep getting crushed by my func_plats when going up, even though they're damage 0 and have nothing out of the ordinary applied. They seem to be touching me more than once per frame and doing 1 point of damage, stripping off my armour before hurting me.

Is this an engine issue? Framerate?

It isn't happening with func_doors but in some cases I need platforms. 

it is a bug with the collision detection of the engine.
i forget exactly what it was, but it had to do with bounding boxes.

if you are inside the bounding box of a mover, this can happen. the solution (i think?) was to make it so you were standing on the top of the bounding box of the mover pushing you up... 

Ok, thanks. 

It seems its an accuracy issue - my platforms were just too thin. 

Preface: I understand that this is in no means practical.

Has anybody ever tried starting with a large solid and carving the map from that? A subtractive rather than additive process? 

i tried it for my first failed map in 1996. after 5 rooms the qbsp process started taking many minutes. Probably the tools aren't designed for it. (of course, the issues isn't qbsp, it's the editor that has to chop up the brushes into normal additive brushes that get sent to the compiler.) And really, most people here will tell you not even to carve a single hole in a wall in an otherwise additive map, since most editors carving tools are so bad. 

unreal worked like that. 

Unreal did work this way. The tools for quake aren't really designed for it. 

Unreal got away with it because it was designed to support subtractions right from the start. Quake was not. 

you didn't really subtract but you could only create playable areas, not walls. 

Is also subtractive. Too bad really, I've noticed that engines that use that method didn't get a lot of 3rd party mods or levels like additive ones did\do. The subtractive method is an inherently non-intuitive way to make content which made a lot of people shy away from games that used it IMO. That the first major games that were modded by a lot of people (Doom and Quake specifically) used additive geometry probably didn't help in getting people to switch over. 

I found Unreal editing much easier actually. No need to seal, just map away. 

I really prefer subtractive mapping, I find it a huge timesaver. Consider the following scenario:

have 2 cube rooms with a single straight corridor connecting them.
Minimum amount of brushes for additive: 22
Minimum amount of brushes for subtractive: 3

Of course, there's no reason you cannot just carve out a big box and map additively inside it, just like you do with Quake style map editors. The only difference is you don't need to bother with sealing your map. 

maybe because i'm used to it (17 yrs. experience!), additive building doesn't bother me. But it seems like, when dealing with very detailed architecture and not cube rooms like in the example above, the advantages of subtractive are reduced. Instead of 22 brusehs vs. 3 brushes, it's more like 1022 brushes vs. 1003 brushes.

If you are additive building all the details in a room, and you produce what would have been a leak in an additive map, instead what you will get is a contained, unfilled void with a bunch of unneeded faces, between the back of the additive brushes and the edge of that room. So it's better but, better still is to fix the leak.

Or map with a modern engine where details are provided by meshes and polygons don't count as much as draw calls. Then quake's building technique is pretty obsolete. :)