I have this event in my map with a starfield anim skybox, and two static entities. I added lights under the statics so they come up bright.

At least, they did. I didn't pay much attention at it,
but my last maps end up with pichblack ones.
I haven't changed anything, but I have no idea what has happened.

scrambled 

I think you need to make the floor of the room a regular non-sky texture, add a light so the floor is lit up, then add a sky-textured "false bottom" above that.

The problem with having sky only is, the engine function that sets up the .mdl lighting (R_LightPoint) traces downward from the model, but it needs to find a lightmapped (non-sky) face in order to read a light value. 

The trick to light models above sky (such as in space maps) is indeed like ericw says. All it takes is a solid brush inside the bottom sky brush (ideally some 32 units away from the inner surface) and a single spotlight with a large cone. However, note that this only works as long as the distance between sky(floor) and model doesn't exceed 1024 units or so. 

That's what I was looking for.
I had no idea where to search.
thanx ericw neg!ke. 

It can exceed 1024 units in fitzquake derived engines. I think I set the max to 8k, which was enough at the time. 

hey everyone,

now that I'm done with jam9, I've got more questions about quake mapping.

While I was making my map for the jam, I've run into some issue with world bounds or whatever its called. Even though my map compiled just fine, in the game, when you cross certain point you start seeing other side of the map, while everything around you disappear. It's like I've been warped around the available space. I fixed it by moving my whole map slightly to the side, but what I'd like to know is this warping like normal behaviour when you get out of bounds? How to avoid it? Is there anyway to display current world bounds, preferably in Trenchbroom? Couldn't find anything.

Also, I know that BSP2 format have extended limitations of the original bsp format, and I would very much like to use them. How do I make my maps BSP2 is it automatic or do I need some special tools for that? Because clearly in my example with jam map, tools didn't detected me going out of range.

Thanks! 

The map can not be larger than 8092x8092x8092 units. You may have passed one of the thresholds. Moving the map back within the bounds is the correct thing to do. 

I ran into the same issue while doing my Qump map. Though in my case the problem is caused after 2000-3000 units. I had been fixing and tinkering other things first, now this can be solved on the go. Thanks alot. 

I had the same issue. My outdoor area caused this and I had to do some interesting things to figure out what was going on.

As far as BSP2 from what I understand you use the -bsp2 command line switch in QBSP when you are compiling. However, I tried this and it didn't solve my problem so there are most likely some other things we'd need to do.

I know sock and Tronyn use the format and most likely Skacky. Can you guys confirm or give us some tips? Documentation is spotty on this. 

quakespasm can be told to support larger coords with sv_protocol 999, which will effectively remove that limit completely. FTE will autodetect, while DP does the equivalent regardless (dpp7 always uses floats for coords).

with most people still using quakespasm or worse, you would have to convince all those people to fiddle with commands(every time they start the engine _before_ loading your map) or even switch engines, and frankly people are too lazy for that. Your best choice is to just stick to the limit Fifth said, and re-center your map if any part that can contain a visible point entity exceeds the +/-4096 range (that is, you can have scenery/fancy sky/brush areas outside that range, but don't let players/monsters/(ideally)projectiles into it.

BSP2 will not help you here - even the vanilla bsp format supports coords up to +/-32k.

note that brushwork (and submodels, thanks to them usually having origin 0 0 0) can be outside the +/- 4096 range. its only point entities like monsters/items and especially players that you have to worry about. probably you don't care about projectiles, which means you can provide nice detailed scenery around your map, and just shove a clip brush around it in case the player tries rocket jumping near scrags or whatever. 

The 8192^3 limit cannot be surpassed. 

thanks everyone! things are now more clear to me :) although I can't believe that sock's giant maps fit into that limit, because my jam9 map isn't really big and I didn't go too far away from the origin. 

One tip, add 2 entities and set their origins (type in) to 4096 4096 4096 and -4096 -4096 -4096. These are the corners of the box you need to fit in. (Make sure to delete them after) 

(Make sure to delete them after)

Won't info_null remove itself before qbsp detects an entity outside hulls, though? 

@ericw nice tip! just did it on my map... turns out my map that big :-E at least in one direction lol :D 

Won't info_null remove itself before qbsp detects an entity outside hulls, though?
They're not deleted until QC spawns them, so they would still cause leaks. 

I'm using Quoth (for fairly obvious purposes) and I've been trying to use info_command to switch from a skybox to the regular scrolling sky texture. This in theory should be accomplished by the sky "" command. However doing the following in info_command:

"message" "sky """

Makes for an invalid command, since it interprets the first quote as the closing quote. Technically it still works but it stuffs the "skybox not found" warnings to console which is unpleasant.

I have a workaround, which is to switch to a dummy skybox with one TGA file missing and put some ammo over the trigger to flush the error messages away, but I would prefer a cleaner approach.

Any ideas if this is doable? 

There is a way to backslash in the quotes or maybe use single quotes around it.

Have you tried "sky "? 

 

"message" "sky \"\"" would work fine in fte, but other engines will just get confused - they ONLY support \n.
Even DP will fuck up its own saved games when there's a saved string with a quote inside it.

if you can supply a default.cfg or something then you can include an alias, but of course quakespasm/etc can't cope with quotes there either. so yeah, you're screwed. 

Yeah, since there isn't a good way to bind this to a key, I'm not surprised it's hard.

In theory, we could add this as a future feature because sending two quotes from QC isn't nearly as tricky. There are already spawnflags on an info_command that determine how the command gets terminated, having an extra one which says "" gets inserted at the end would be a fix. Are there commands besides sky which might need the same thing? It might be a bit specialised if it's for one console command.

I think the cleanest way to do it in Quoth as it stands is to add a clearsky.cfg file with the following content:

sky ""
echo
echo
echo
echo

Because you're not trying to bind the troublesome command to an alias you get to have the double quotes. The idea then is to make your info_command send the string exec clearsky.cfg, and the 4 echos just spam whitespace to clear the notification that the cfg executed. 

Is there a way to increase the audible distance of an ambient sound in vanilla?
Some kind of key like "wait" ? 

but you can use copies of them to approximate the same thing 

Duplicating an ambient sound emitter can give a noticeable 'echo' or layering effect that isn't always desirable, doesn't it? At least my bit of testing gave that effect. 

Yeah, duplicating isn't ideal, but might be the best solution for vanilla limits.

I'm fooling around with logic gates, also in vanilla, using trap_spikeshooters. I have a problem where the spikeshooter seems to trigger a button, but the button doesn't seem to trigger the relay connected to it.
If I go in and shoot the button myself, it triggers the relay, but not when the spikeshooter hits it. The button does seem to move backwards when its hit by the spikeshooter, just doesn't activate the relay.
Any idea what might be causing this?, or any advice on logic gates with messages for what needs to be done? Is it possible to use trigger_counters instead of logic gates a lot of the time?

Here's an image of what I'm trying to get working:
http://imgur.com/n0shMeg

The player hits a switch to open a door, but is told via message that x needs to be done first. once x is done, hitting the switch again will open the door.