Hi!

Have some good links here.
Best wishes.



https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/3ys4vg/a_month_ago_i_released_a_free_space_skybox/

https://www.quake3world.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=9242

https://gamebanana.com/textures/cats/62

http://www.custommapmakers.org/skyboxes.php

http://gfx.quakeworld.nu/browse/other/skyboxes/ 

Thanks OTP. And GunSgtHighway, although I should've clarified I was looking for old-school style sky textures rather than skyboxes. 

Hi!

I'm getting crazy on this.
Is there a way to turn for example lights on and of or turn it on with two buttons and turn it off again? Thought I can handle this with trigger_relays or an info_notnull but I have no coding practise. Is there a tutorial or a manual for coding, spawnflags,...? 

turn lights on and off -- give light(s) a targetname, give button that matching target, make sure the button has a wait that is not -1.

same lights with two buttons -- if you want either button to do it, just give both buttons the same target value.

same light with two buttons, where you have to press both -- both buttons have wait = -1, they both target a trigger_counter, which triggers the light. This setup is not repeatable.

two buttons that you have to press both and then the light turns off and then you press them both again and it turns on -- a complicated setup with logic gates probably. 

Not sure if this exactly what Sgt wanted, but here's a light that requires pressing two buttons (order doesn't matter) to be turned on or off. The buttons stay depressed until the other is pressed at which point the light toggles and they both reset. Demonstration here, bsp and map here. As metlslime suggested, it's done with some logic gates, a setup that could be cleaned up a lot by someone more skilled with gate optimization who doesn't rely on babby-mode spike shooters like I do, or just using a custom progs set, not to mention fixing up the timing on the button and trigger resets a bit. 

Thanks for answers.

What I want to do is to put a little more riddles in my maps.
Means I made three buttons. Two of them have to be pushed for activating something, the other on sets them and the activating thing back to zero and you can push them again.

I don't know if quake supports this logic things with IF and THEN. But hopefully there might be a way. @Spud I'm hoping to find time today or tommorow to check your map out. Big thanks anyway! 

Quake doesn't support that kind of logic internally (at least, not in terms of what one can normally use in the map, other than predefined setups i.e. "open door if player has key, else don't open door"), but you can use the various entities to make physical logic gates including if, then, all sorts of and, nand, and so on, and combine them all to do all sorts of tricksy logic stuff that you'd never expect to be possible. Some of them involve other types of map hacks (info_notnulls and InitTriggers and so on), but the most basic form just needs a spike shooter trap, a door, and a button- a simple if gate. From there everything spirals outwards, and you can even save a couple entities/edicts by using further hacks in the gate itself.

There's some great reading material to be found around, including the QuakeWiki entity pages and the QuakeC source, but here's a couple offhand:
New Logic Gate Design (2013) and part two of the same article,, along with Logic Gates for 2017, all hosted at the Tome of Preach, a most excellent site run by Preach that's absolutely chock-full of crazy map hacks. Those articles primarily focus on gates themselves; there's a number of other pages on the site that go into detail about specific hacks, some of which require gates, others that don't.

Not coincidentally, the last page above also links to a relatively ancient example of the aforementioned trap-shooter logic gate in Quake 2, penned by metlslime, whose post is a couple paragraphs up, and whose thread we're posting in, not to mention whose board we're posting on. Maximum respect to the old guard for figuring this stuff out years ago so us noobs don't have to.

The Teaching Old Progs.dat New Tricks thread is an enormous and fantastic source of information and hacks for the vanilla (id1) codebase, many of which aren't collected anywhere else and some of which are only discussed in the thread in throwing-science-at-the-wall form, but would be refined and used by mappers months or even years later. Ctrl+f is your friend, and sometimes stuff shows up in other threads like this one instead; if that thread doesn't have it, I find just Googling "topic or hack you're looking for here" site:celephais.net often works very well.

Lastly, dumptruck_ds (whose videos relating to Trenchbroom you've likely seen once or a dozen times) created and runs a Quake mapping help/discussion Discord channel along with a number of long-time or experienced mappers, if you're into the instant-response* type of help. You can't say how fucking awesome someone's newest screenshot or mod might be, though, because apparently we aren't all consenting adults there.

*instant response may be less than instant depending on time of day and interest level of whoever's online 

Wow! That helps!Thanks!
It's realy hard to get into that stuff no matter what you find in the web as long as you find the links between informations and understand how to use it.
Thank you very much!

PS.: No instant reponse guy. Have a Job to do too. :) 

Thanks for the map. Checked it.
Thats a lot to learn. :)

Best wishes. 

Here's a similar hack which is specifically about toggling lights. There are five different lights in the example, so it's a bit more complex that what you were after. But there are some useful things to bear in mind here.

https://tomeofpreach.wordpress.com/2018/02/22/five-statues-challenge/

I should also mention that I wouldn't treat the 2013 logic gates as an alternative to the 2017 article - the 2017 method is better all round because it fixes a bug, is easier to integrate using copy-paste, and supports an unlimited number of output on a single gate. Upgrade your map today! 

Thanks!. Thats an good to read tutorial!

Think I got it slowly.
So I have to transfer my If/Then-diagram to a gate model where every gate simulates an 0-1 status that will be activated by a target_shooter pointing on an info_notnull that does the action? 

it's been a pretty long while since I've started on a new map in trenchbroom, but when I run the compiler it looks like there's no .bsp for the map. I've had this problem before but I don't remember what to do.

here's what it says:

#### Executing 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Quake\bin\light.exe coldwiz.bsp'
---- light / TyrUtils v0.15 ----
running with 4 threads
************ ERROR ************
Error opening coldwiz.bsp: No such file or directory 

Many times this is an issue with spaces in the path names. I see you are using TyrUtils so that could be it. ericw tools are the next "gen" of TyrUtils. I highly recommend you use them. https://ericwa.github.io/ericw-tools/

And in general just check all the paths in your compiling configs. 99% of the time that's is the issue. 

Hi, deving a map for AD mod with rusty hands.

How do you trigger console commands (or change cvars) within a map at runtime? Triggers, timers, etc.
In this case I want to alter the worldspawn "_gamma" value.

Searched various boards but couldn't find or understand how. Is it possible without altering .qc?

Thanks in advance. 

For stuffcmd. Not sure AD has this but probably does.

People are wary of abuse so be careful. 

What's the nastiest, most malicious thing a jolly japester can do with this? I'm genuinely intrigued.

Sounds like a good Jam idea: "break someone's PC with stuffcmd lol". 

Allegedly this used to be a thing:

apparently the Quake engine lets you overwrite the game data with savegames should you be enough of a moron to call your save “pak0.pak”, a bug that seems to hail all the way from the original release eighteen years ago

But I can't reproduce it in QuakeSpasm... maybe for the best. 

Well that's a good one. 

..yeah, better stick to fog triggers. 

Fitzquake-derived ports (at least QS and Mark V) are smart enough to add a .sav extension to the end of whatever filename you enter, even if it already includes a different one, so it won't let you overwrite any files other than existing save files. Other ports and versions do not do that, however, meaning that you can indeed overwrite .pak files with savegames in Winquake... and Darkplaces. Oh yes.

I actually fiddled with this on my own a little while back to see what exactly can be done in that vein with vanilla console commands, and the answer turns out to be "not much." Most cvars that allow you to stuffcmd (map, save, load, etc) will either interpret directory-modifying characters as part of the normal folder or filepath or are intentionally set to ignore such commands, e.g.
save foo/bar.sav (a subfolder) will spit out
ERROR: couldn't open.
and
save ..foo.sav (a parent directory) will throw up
Relative pathnames are not allowed.
and
save ./foo.sav (the same directory) will expel
Saving game to <Quake directory>/./foo.sav... but will write the save file to the normal directory, making the ./ showing up misleading.
game, which isn't present in the original engines, will auto-reject anything that isn't a single directory name, not a path.

So you can overwrite .pak files in your game's base directory and not much else and that's only if you're using a outdated or shitty engine, but what about loading files? Again, nearly everything is locked down- map will load maps from subfolders, but not in parent ones. Everything else will give the same errors (primarily the relative pathnames one) except the exec command, which does allow directory changes in every port I've tried. Not especially interesting, but it does allow it, e.g.
exec ../quoth/config.cfg while playing in id1 will function and return
execing ../quoth/config.cfg
This (obviously) also works for the quake.rc stored within vanilla or mod .pak files. All the above limitations still apply to whatever's written in those config files, though. You can also string multiple ../ segments to navigate to two, three, and so on folders up.

So, food for thought: someone more malicious and skilled than myself can probably find some nasty way to write to system files outside of the Quake directory, and Darkplaces sucks. I didn't test the various extra console stuff in AD and similar mods, but I doubt they left any serious holes open. 

Sorry for likely asking a repeated question, but in regards to SM189 being:

"Progs: id1, because I feel it's too soon for another modded pack after the last speedmap/halloween jam/xmas jam."

Obviously Id1 .dat entities etc., yet are these vanilla jams intended to run w/out mod engines?

In this case I'd want to use alphas textures, eg. window/crossbar alphas contained in the various doomtex wads. Is there a restriction on the added functionality these mod engines provide? (alpha, fog, increased limits..)

..also, where the HELL should it be submitted?? 

Obviously Id1 .dat entities etc., yet are these vanilla jams intended to run w/out mod engines?

Yes, but almost everybody uses QuakeSpasm, so it's fine to consider a target engine.

..also, where the HELL should it be submitted??

Package the .bsp and the .lit if it exists in a zip file, upload to your file sharing service of choice cough and post in the speedmapping thread.

Alternatively catch me on the Quake Mapping Discord. 

"Hmm, not enough ash.." *stirs mortar 

I'm new to trenchbroom, been messing around with it after watching some tutorials just to get a handle on working with the software, and the entity info_player_start seems to be emitting that teleporter ambience. how do I get rid of this? 

If you have a monster spawning in using the point entity method set the spawnflag to 2 for silent. That will solve this issue.

When I made the entity tutorial I was unaware that that hack caused the teleport sound to play at origin 0.0.0

Hopefully this is the cause of your issue.