To get the explosion of particles when the projectile lands, you need to use the following rather unintelligible code:

WriteByte (MSG_BROADCAST, SVC_TEMPENTITY);
WriteByte (MSG_BROADCAST, TE_EXPLOSION2);
WriteCoord (MSG_BROADCAST, self.origin_x);
WriteCoord (MSG_BROADCAST, self.origin_y);
WriteCoord (MSG_BROADCAST, self.origin_z);
WriteByte (MSG_BROADCAST, 35);
WriteByte (MSG_BROADCAST, 8);

The most interesting value to play around with here is the one currently set to 35. This controls the colour of the particles. The 35th colour in the palette is a pale blue, so that's the colour of the explosion, 144 makes it bright purple instead.

The following value sets the range of colours that the particles cycle through. At the moment, the value 8 means that we cycle through eight colours in the palette. In the example, the next 7 colours after the starting point are all slightly different shades of blue, so the effect is a slightly dappled effect. If you changed this value to 255 then you would get (almost) all the colours in the palette.

QC Quiz: What goes wrong if you set this value to 256? 

It wraps to zero and you don't get any particles? Or they're all black ... or something ... 

 

It wraps to zero

Yes! As the function suggests, the value is packed into a byte, and so a value of 256 will be transmitted as zero instead. Based on the patch notes for darkplaces, I'd guess this will usually make the engine crash with a divide by zero error. 

TE_EXPLOSION2 doesn't exist (a trap!), so I changed to TE_EXPLOSION. Compiled it, run it, and when the projectile hits, this happens: http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2015/53/1451421144-infantry20151229213012-00.jpg

Is this an isolated incident to DP or did I made a mistake on just copy pasting your code? 

#define TE_EXPLOSION2 12
it was created for rogue, so tends to not be pre-defined in vanilla id1 code, but it does work in all NQ engines (but not vanilla qw) if used properly. 

It's like when I tried to make a custom explosion sound for a rocket soldier: the original explosion sound seem to always play whenever TE_EXPLOSION or any variant is called. There's also no burst of light and the particle spread, while blue like I wanted, doesn't look as good as the original one. 

Yeah, it's annoying that the engine does that - there is a silly workaround though. Replace the sound/weapons/r_exp3.wav file with a silent sound like sound/misc/null.wav. Then you need to add the sound back onto the the grenade and rocket explosion by making a copy of the original sound and playing it manually. 

You said some time ago your website holds a way to make a monster spawner, much like how Quoth did. I did look for it in the Code section but I haven't found such a thing. Maybe the title is different, or it's not in the Code section? 

I'm trying to change the position of the lasers from mp1 to match the new quake 1.5 models. I've managed to correctly change the position of everything else. But looking at the code, I'm having some trouble figuring out where/how to actually change it.

I assume it is here:
=================
HIP_FireLaser
=================
*/
void(float stat) HIP_FireLaser =
{
local vector org;
local vector dir;
local vector out;
local float ofs;
local float aofs;

if (!self.button0)
{
player_run ();
return;
}
if (self.ammo_cells < 1)
{
self.weapon = W_BestWeapon ();
W_SetCurrentAmmo ();
return;
}
SuperDamageSound();
self.effects = self.effects | EF_MUZZLEFLASH;
makevectors (self.v_angle);

ofs = 6;
out = v_forward;
out_z = 0;
out = normalize(out);
org = self.origin + ((12-ofs) * v_up) + (12*out); // this is the value I have to change for the starting position?
// org = self.origin + (1*v_forward);
dir = aim (self, 1000);
aofs = ofs * 0.707;
if (stat == 0)
{
self.currentammo = self.ammo_cells = self.ammo_cells - 1;
org = org + (aofs*v_right);
org = org - (aofs*v_up);
HIP_LaunchLaser(org, dir, 0);
org = org - (2*aofs*v_right);
HIP_LaunchLaser(org, dir, 0);
}
else if (stat == 1)
{
self.currentammo = self.ammo_cells = self.ammo_cells - 1;
org = org + (ofs*v_up);
if (random()<0.1)
{
HIP_LaunchLaser(org, dir, 1);
newmis.dmg = 25;
}
else
HIP_LaunchLaser(org, dir, 0);
}
self.punchangle_x = -1;
}; 

 

Yes, its where you commented. I went a little further and made a .vector vwep_pos , that merely points to that org vector in each of the weapon firing functions...so now its easy to know where a missile originated from with respect to the player.Its a little but weird because the Quake guy dont really hold the weapon up to his eye level like other games do, but alot of the tracelines in Quake start at eye position, and there is a difference depending on what knd of calc you wanna do.

Also, I have tried to make the starting point of the missile or the beam for the LG look just as good from the first person view , as from the outside of the model when firing. Its tough, and I dont think there is really a way to make it look exactly right...bleh. 

@Daya
Little known hack for explosion particles without sound:
particle(pos, '0 0 0', 0, 255);
(direction and colour will be ignored, count must be exactly 255, pos is the middle, obviously) 

Is there a way to disable or control the frequency of the red screen flash when the player takes damage? Apparently the QC is not doing a bf stuffcmd, so I guess this is done engineside? It sould be neat to setup the intensity based on the amount of damage taken...right now using Darkplaces, I cant find a setting for this and the effect seems the same no matter what the damage taken is. 

Dunno but sounds like the sort of thing that would trigger Smabler so go for it. 

Dmg_take controls red tint, dmg_save armour tint. Dmg_inflictor I think controls how the screen tilts. 

Does anyone have some documentation they could link me on how lightmaps are stored inside the .bsp?

I'm trying to create a Quake 1 map renderer in Unity and lightmaps are sort of my final frontier.

I've found some conflicting documentation, most of which is vague. From what I gather the lightmaps themselves are simple arrays of values 0-255. I assume it's just a big lump of bytes, and the faces point into it to the start of their lightmap, but I do not know how to determine the size of any given face's lightmap. bspfile.h defines it as [numstyles*surfsize], but I'm not sure where to find or how to calculate a faces surfsize for this purpose.

Can anyone toss me a pointer? 

Yeah, it's convoluted because they're not stored, you have to compute the lightmap sizes.

For each vertex on the face, you get the X and Y texture coordinates like this:

texcoord_x = (vert_x, very_y, vert_z, 1) dot (tex->vecs[0])
texcoord_y = (vert_x, very_y, vert_z, 1) dot (tex->vecs[1])

tex->vecs[0] and tex->vecs[1] are both vectors of 4 floats, tex is the texinfo_t* that has that's face texture alignment info.

Then, to get how many bytes wide/tall the lightmap is:
lightmap_width = ceil(max(texcoord_x) / 16.0) - floor(min(texcoord_x) / 16.0) + 1
lightmap_height = ceil(max(texcoord_y) / 16.0) - floor(min(texcoord_y) / 16.0) + 1

max(texcoord_x) is the maximum texcoord_x across all verts on the face. Hopefully I didn't mess anything up and the notation makes sense.

For reference this is the light tool code:
https://github.com/ericwa/tyrutils-ericw/blob/master/light/ltface.c#L355 

the engine source is probably the best documentation since it has code that reads, converts, and renders the lightmaps. 

Once you know, https://quakewiki.org/ would be a great host for that kind of information. 

I assume the notation above is dealing directly in the x/y coords of worldspace? I've already tamed the textures and mapping, if what I'm understanding is right, I should be able to use my existing code for decoding the texture UVs to do the lightmaps as well, with a little tweaking.

It was confusing because a lot of scraps I was finding were saying that lightmapping information/decoding was totally unrelated to texture UVs/composition, but it looks like that's not entirely true.

I'll give it a shot when I get off work.

Glad to see this place is still active. It was a huge help last time I worked on this project. It's the reason I've made it this far. 

I assume the notation above is dealing directly in the x/y coords of worldspace?
Yeah, the vert_x, very_y, vert_z are worldspace.

texcoord_x/y are in texture space, and dividing these by the texture width/height gives the texture U/V coordinates normalized to [0,1] (except they go outside that range for repeating.) So yeah you should be able to reuse some of the texturing code for this :-)

btw as a sanity check, the lightmap_width/height values you get should be between 1 and 18. 

Going further into properly integrating Scourge of Armagon's code into my mod, this time its sprites can't be properly compiled.
FTEqcc says "line9 - Unknown frame macro $spritename"

Here's the hipspr.qc file: http://pastebin.com/t0VypXAU

And yes, I made sure I also copy pasted the sprite files in the progs directory. 

that reminds me, i love that Jim Dose called it "QuickC" 

Daya, skip that file (delete it or something), its not qc code.
(note how its not included in hipnotic's progs.src either)