Seriously now, I want to do a tech level with some few small spaceships shooting at a large one visible through one of the station's windows. It's merely aesthetic, but I want the spaceships to appear flying around and shooting the large spaceship. 

 

func_trains and lots of triggering. 

You'll need to become rather proficient in QuakeC before you can start slicing that particular sausage.

I have no idea if there are any decent QC resource sites still online.

Leaving all the QC aside for a minute, you will find that you don't have much room in Quake's map bounds to have a very large scene like that, so you'll also need to do some tricks to fake perspective to make everything look bigger than it is.

The simplest way to make an object look arbitrarily large is to keep its displacement from the player constant.

A simple example - let's say you want to create the illusion of a planet or a huge spaceship - you create a small model that fits in a sky-textured room outside your window, but you will have to update the position of the model every frame so that its relative displacement from the player never changes - that way it will appear to never move in the player's view and will always seem very far away. 

What wad editor is good today? 

or Wally 

can be used portable for a hard disk? 

https://www.quaddicted.com/files/tools/texmex_34.exe 

 

 

No, not directly. They need to be changed to bitmaps and the colors converted to the Quake palette. That can be done in a graphics/image editing program such as PaintShopPro, Photoshop, GIMP, etc. After that you can copy and paste them into a wad with TexMex. 

 

https://www.quaddicted.com/files/tools/texmex_34_portable.7z 

I'm not sure if the textures are sourced from the game files, or if the textures are actually compiled into the map. I ask this, because you can extract textures from a .bsp, but if you don't own the full game, textures from the full game don't load. 

The bsp compiler takes the .wad textures and embeds them into the .bsp

The .wad is not actually used by the game.

No idea why they decided to do it like that. Anyone know? 

Textures from wad get compiled into the bsp. The wad files did not ship with the game (except gfx.wad), it always loads textures from the bsp itself.

What sypmtoms are you seeing when you say "textures from the full game don't load" ? 

That the maps I put on there that use full-game textures have invisible walls. When they come back after getting the full game, they can see the textures. I have no idea if it's just the client or my server. It's actually pretty weird. 

i assume it looks correct on your machine in your engine of choice.

does it look correct in a different engine?

how about in a clean quake folder with no other mods or content? 

Clean full Quake has no trouble. Both DP and FQ work fine as well. I am trying to get the Quake demo files to test with, which is honestly harder than getting the full game. 

what about registered quake but without any 3rd party content?

also, what engine do your other testers use?

and how do they get the map? Installed manually or auto-downloaded by their client? 

So, anytime I try to record a demo, it says "recording to dem01" in the console but I never can find my demo files. I'm using Fitz085. Where is it supposed to save them? 

As soon as I record a demo it is in the directory I'm in at that moment.
Mostly I find my *.dem files in TmpQuarK.
When I'm in a mod than it's that one.
If you're not sure just type "path"in the console before you start recording.

Or you could go for "search demo01.dem". 

"Clean full Quake" refers to registered Quake with no 3rd party content.

I have no idea really, I host a DarkPlaces server, and it doesn't seem to work with any other Quake World clients. I'd assume that people joining my server are only using DarkPlaces.

And maps are auto downloaded. 

hmm, i guess the next thing to try would be to have a clean install of quake and use it as a client to connect to your server, and see if the download process works with the textures.

I wonder if this is some kind of engine bug, since all the ways you've tested so far work fine. 

I've seen instances where surfaces didn't get drawn correctly and you could see through, but only very rarely and obviously some kind of bsp problem since the texture was drawn in other places. Every time I've had actual missing textures, Quake draws the checkerboard pattern instead.