And by that, I mean an ambient_drone from off to on. Any ideas? 

You obviously tried swapping the sounds around from that same solution? 

Let's just blame that one on lack of sleep, shall we? 

Works with the standard sound hack.
A trigger with "use" "train_wait" and "noise" "ambience/drone6.wav". It will start looping the sound after being fired (the sound has to be precached). Afaik, turning it off again is not possible, though. 

once the player moves out of range of the new sound, it will no longer be looping if the player goes back into range.

it's unfortunate, but afaik, there is no way to have a true ambient sound be customizable. it can only be hard-coded. :( 

Surely you can use trigger_relays to force the ambient to start every 5 seconds (or at some multiple of it's length). Sounds a little bad if you hear it suddenly start, but it will keep it playing... 

you get clipping artifacts when the sound restarts, since even if you made the sound loop perfectly, quakec is not going to reliably time the cut at exactly 5000ms or whatever. 

It does keep looping infinitely regardless of where the player goes. 

#16 - How does that work exactly; could you post an example entity? Is it also possible to override a monsters existing th_missle function, e.g. to let scrags shoot voreballs and hellknights shoot Chthon etc? 

because the th_ functions are set in the monster spawn functions. you'd have to 'build' the monster you want from scratch and then modify from there. 

"build" in quakec or in a .map hack? 

similar to how does one build a killable Chthon with info_notnull hackery?

http://forums.inside3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=475 

i was referring to the post a little while ago about building a monster with an info_notnull 

As we all know, having large amounts of health can never be wrong, but unfortunately the Megahealth item doesn't like us to be enjoy our surplus very long. Time to change it:

"classname" "info_notnull"
"origin" "# # #"
"think" "PlaceItem"
"nextthink" "0.2"
"touch" "health_touch"
"healtype" "2"
"healamount" "100" // up to 250
"maxs" "32 32 56"
"model" "maps/b_bh100.bsp"
"modelindex" "#"
"noise" "items/r_item2.wav"
"targetname" "mh"
"killtarget" "mh"
"delay" "0.1"

Now, what's so special about this? The killtarget actually prevents the item from rotting down to 100 like normal Megahealth packs do. This way, nothing will be wasted if one doesn't engage in battle immediately.

You could also do this at map start, for example, by creating an info_notnull brush entity with the same fields except "maxs", "model" and "modelindex", and changing "think" to "InitTrigger" 

A neater way (for some situations, e.g. secrets) of using the BackpackTouch hack mentioned earlier in this thread:

"classname" "info_notnull"
"origin" "# # #"
"think" "PlaceItem"
"nextthink" "0.2"
"touch" "BackpackTouch"
"model" "progs/backpack.mdl"
"modelindex" "#"
"ammo_shells" "20"
"ammo_nails" "50"
"ammo_rockets" "10"
"ammo_cells" "25"

This will create a backpack that looks and behaves exactly like those the monsters (or players in DM) drop. Of course you can also put some weapons in, with "items" "#" and "netname" "Weapon name". Just don't squish the sandwiches, though. 

Ooh, love the backpack idea! Neat stuff, negke! 

couldn't you just killtarget/target a regular MH pack? why does it have to be a notnull for the trick to work? 

Indeed you could.
The info_notnull just lets you set custom heal values. 

For reasons that you will probably not understand even when explained to you, you should make the nextthinks in the above two hacks 1.2 and not 0.2 

I thought items are spawned/drop after 0.2 seconds. I've never encountered problems with this value anyway. 

I thought it was 0.1 so, yeah, this should work... 

But time starts at 1, not 0 

Has any work been done to incorporate, say, Lua into a progs? 

I wouldn't recommend it.

AFAIK it wouldn't be difficult, but Lua gets messy over time and, to me at least, is harder to debug than qc. 

The reason I ask is because I love programming in highly-expressive languages, specifically Scheme and Haskell. I know Lua isn't "all that", but something nicer than QC would make me happy. After all it's a hobby, and hobbies should be f.u.n.!