#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.! 

Haskell is pretty fun. Studied it in the first year of Uni up in Edinburgh. Phil Wadler, the designer of Haskell was the lecturer, and I'll never forget the first lecture, when he tore off the shirt he was wearing to reveal a t-shirt with a giant lambda symbol on it.

He also shouted LAAAMBAAAA!!!. Dude really loved lambda calculus. Think I laughed at that for a solid week. For reference he also looks like this:
http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/Pics/philtiebig.jpg 

That is awesome. I've noticed that a lot of people worship the lambda. Have you heard the story about how Feynman, for his intro physics class, hung a bowling ball from the ceiling? He stood up against the wall, pulled the ball up to touch his nose -- and let it go. Of course, on the return swing, it did not touch smash into his face. His point was that physics works, and you have to get an intuitive feel for it to be good at it.

There's a nice thread here about 'why did Church pick lambda?':

http://groups.google.com/group/plt-scheme/browse_frm/thread/d8a31482f811a0e8/42064e654a20887d?tvc=1 

is it possible to trigger a target with a monster as the activator?

i've tried spawning the monster on top of a trigger_teleport, having the monster walk onto the trigger_teleport (with path corners) and lowering a monster into a trigger_teleport with a func_door.

the trigger_teleport had a target, but somehow i was still the activator when the monster would go through the teleporter.

all i can think of would be to make a dummy monster that targets the entity, and make the spike_touch hack kill the dummy with the owner pointing to the activator monster, but that's convoluted as hell and really ugly. 

For example, if a monster kills another through infighting, and the dead monster had a target, then the killer will be the activator of the target. This caused a very tricky to identify bug in a recent map whose author will remain nameless here...
So it can happen.

Making it happen on demand is a bit trickier. I think I've come up with a hack that will do it though. Add an info_notnull and set its enemy field to the entity number of the monster in question. Then set its use field to trigger_multiple. Then if you use the info_notnull, it will fire its targets with its enemy as the activator.

How it works: originally I was going to try doing it with the "naked trigger_multiple" hack, where you make a trigger that monsters can touch, and have the teleporting monster touch it. That trick relies on short-circuiting the multi_touch function which usually guards against non-player touches.

Unfortunately, skipping that function also skips the line which sets the trigger's enemy to the touching monster/player/fireball. This enemy is then used as the activator - so you still wouldn't get the monster as the activating entity. Instead you get whatever was in the enemy field to being with - world being the default. I got half way through typing up a solution involving the spike_touch hack setting off a trigger_multiple with health, before I saw the short cut that would save an entity...

Not properly tested it btw, but I'm pretty sure that will work as intended! 

that sounds like a much better solution. this brings me to another question i should have asked: how *do* you find the edict numbers?

typing edicts in the console outputs ALL the edicts, and even with condumping, it only actually prints the last 80-100 or so. (the map has over 600 edicts).

all i can think of is to maybe make a progs, but can you even bprint() the edict number? 

this always happens, i figure out how to do it after i ask. :P 

it works. thanks!

btw, it's 'use' 'multi_trigger', not 'trigger_multiple' 

This is actually reminds me of something I've had in the back of my mind as a desirable feature for a "development" quake engine. Better searching of the entity list with the edict command. The biggest improvement would be to be able to specify a classname, like

edicts monster_knight

would output a list of every knight in the map.

Once you have that, partial matches would be the next most handy feature, so that

edicts monster_

would return a list of all the monsters in your map. If you really needed flexability, you could extend it to match other fields instead, like

edicts targetname skulldoor

would give you all the entities targeted by "skulldoor". If anyone other than myself would be interested in that, I might take a look at hacking it together...

There are workarounds until such things are available. If you save the game instead of running the edicts command, you can open the save file in a text editor and get essentially the same information out of it - or even run -condebug and read through the output file at the same time. The only thing that the save game lacks is...entity values themselves! So the latter method is needed for those