i really hope some q3 mappers try this out. were you able to fix the 'bug' with q3 rotaters where they are visible everywhere in the map, irregardless of PVS? i remember sock mentioned that when he released his 'map on the edge of forever'.
also, better sound playing entities would probably help a lot too. sock mentioned it was pretty rudimentary. 

As far as I know 3 maps are being made, including one by myself.
The bug you mention is new to me, but it sounds like an issue in the engine, not the game code (mod) so I doubt I could fix this.
As for sound playing entities, what would need to be added? 

http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=60417 see post 70 (me) and post 76:

me:
...this map really highlights the shortcomings of the quake3 engine for ambient sound. it doesn't seem to attenuate volume correctly and just cuts sounds off when you get too far.

sock:
The Q3 sound system is broken in many ways, no volume control, cannot turn off ambient sounds, only on! Sounds rarely fade, just get cut off by portals, doors and button cannot have custom sounds and no channel priority for VO etc. I can understand why the sound system was rewritten for D3 because it lacks so many features.

so i guess basic abilities like being able to start and stop a looping sound and play a non-looping sound at regular and non-regular intervals.
i don't know if you can fix the bugged out sound attenuation though, which is a shame because it's the most intrusive of the problems.

about rotaters, since you can't fix the problem itself, maybe give access to a way to show/hide targetted entities.
that way, you could set up triggers to manually hide rotaters when players can't see them anymore. 

I don't know if I can find the motivation to make a new Q3 map at this point, but after looking through the manual, this looks complete enough and cool enough that I'm really tempted to make an SP version of one of my old maps. I may have to give this a go... 

Quake 3 ogres and wizards! I would probably try and make something if there were. 

there's plenty of cool custom q3 models around (magdalena, darkknight and dragon for starters) to allow monsters that fit different map themes. 

this would have been awesome about 10 yrs ago. especially if someone took some of the awesome custom q3 models and turned them into monsters that aren't just bots.

i would love to have made q3sp levels. probably would have done an episode or something. 

@necros: Yes it is unfortunate that the sound engine in Q3 is so limited. The sound attenuation or volume control is something I cannot add without hacking up the engine which I'm not prepared to do right now. The mod does, however, offer a few things that can solve some problems mentioned.

First of all, it has support for custom door and button sounds. For a door, a 'startsound' and 'endsound' key have been added and buttons have a new 'sound' key.

Turning looped sounds off is something I might be able to add in the mod and it's still on my "to do" list to investigate. I did mimick turning on and off sounds in the example map that comes with the mod. It was done by having a target_delay target itself and a target_speaker that is non-looping. This will cause the speaker to be triggered once ever X seconds where X is roughly the duration of the .wav file it's playing. A trigger will activate the target_delay to make the sound start playing (it's an alarm that goes off). At some point, another trigger is used to turn the sound off again.

This is where you'll need the new target_unlink entity that EntityPlus has. When activated, this entity will remove any entities from the map that it targets, or places them back in if they have been removed. The second trigger in our setup will trigger the target_unlink, which in turn removes the target_disable from the map so it stops triggering the target_speaker, effectively turning the sound off.

It's a bit of a hacky setup, but it works. I would indeed prefer to be able to simply have a trigger_multiple target a looping target_speaker to turn it on and off, which I reckon should be implementable through the mod.

As for the func_rotating being visible everywhere, I haven't ever seen this happen to be honest. But if you do encounter the problem with the mod, then I guess you could use the same target_unlink entitiy to toggle the func_rotating into and out of the map. 

Yay! I've been able to fix the on/off toggling functionality for target_speaker entities. This means you can stop and start them playing their sounds by triggering them.

This fix will be part of the next release of the mod. 

Due to someone else reporting a bug in the mod I've decided to release version 0.8.1 of the mod, which includes both a fix for that bug and the target_speaker fix I talked about in my previous post. Get it here:

https://code.google.com/p/entityplus/downloads/detail?name=entityplus-0.8.1.zip 

...and I'm confused. From 95% of the pdf, the clear message seems to be that this is a single-player only mod. In other words, only one person playing--no coop or suchlike. But under trigger_death, I see references to multiple players in the game...?

Suggestion: It would be cool if the current player score were directly accessible and/or modifiable in-level, to use as a real-time gate for other events (e.g. the player's score is really high for this point in the level, so let's add a bit of additional/optional challenge), rather than only between levels via target_finish and target_mapchange. 

I believe the E+ mod could help Q3 survive for some years to come. These days active MP servers in Q3 are scarce, and those that are active usually have server-side mods that drastically change the gameplay of the original, run stock maps over and over, and are filled with the same veteran players which makes them unfriendly towards newbies. And while there is a large amount of excellent maps being made for Q3 even today, they unfortunately may never get played online no matter how good they are, unless they hop on the QL bandwagon.

But with SP, one isn`t required to find a server with or wait for people in order to get a game going - all he needs to do is hop in and begin playing. There`s also more of a sense of "exploration" in SP than in MP. In MP you`re typically too busy fragging people to worry about anything else, but in SP you feel compelled to inspect every grain of sand in the map in search of a secret or something, to help increase that sense of accomplishment.

I might strongly consider making a map for this mod in the future as it has a lot of potential for the reasons stated above and more. Maybe a Quake 2-based mission with Strogg and stuff. (Mentioning it before anyone else takes the idea, hehe)

Good luck with your progress man! 

the target_botspawn entity does have a �skill� key which can be used to determine an individual bots relative skill level, although this is limited to the amount of damage the bot deals.

Why limit the adjustment to only damage dealt? I seem to remember the skill levels in Q3 actually making the overall bot gameplay smarter...is this rose-colored glasses on my part? I haven't played in roughly forever. 

The bot definition files have defined fuzzy weights for skills 1, 4, and 5, with interpolation used to obtain 2 and 3.

However, I read it that only the global skill level affects bot AI. I suspect that this is because skill levels outside of the range of 1~5 are meaningless to the AI definitions, and would possibly lead to errors. 

I think I'm misunderstanding you, or you me. :)

I read it that only the global skill level affects bot AI

I read it that way too. I'm wondering why the target_botspawn skill key (using something in the 1-5 range) doesn't do so as well.

Also, I just discovered the Q3W thread and am looking through it to get a bit more familiar with what's being done and what has been done.

Damn, I haven't been there in forever... 

@pjw: Regarding trigger_death, the description is a bit ambiguous now, but assume that with "players" it means either the player or bots. The description stems from the time when the mod's goal was still unclear and it wasn't strictly single player only yet. I'll change the description so it's less ambiguous.

The idea of using score as a trigger is an interesting one. I think that could be added as a key to target_relay, so it only triggers it's own target if the player's score is less/more than score X.

The relative skill level for bots was a bit of a quick hack, so the code only refers to that when determining the amount of damage the bot has dealt. I think it's a small change to make it use different AI definition values. The relative skill is a modifier on the current global skill though, so values above 5 are possible. In that case I'll cap the AI skill level at 5 but still use the actual skill value for damage calculation.



@EmeraldTiger: I'm flattered that you see this mod as "the" savior for Quake 3. I don't think it'll be that successful but if even just one person decides to make a map for this, I'm happy :-) 

I appreciate the clarification.

Re: The relative skill is a modifier it would be good to have that modification/formula/value be explicit somewhere in the manual, once that's worked out. :) 

Okay, after reading through the Q3W thread and all the documentation, and figuring out how I was going to turn a swiss-cheesy MP map into a gated SP map, I finally got around to trying it and...

it doesn't work.

I load the mod, either via the .bat or through Q3's menu, and when I click "New Game" it just locks up. Q3 is "not responding" per the task manager. I tried it windowed, to make sure I wasn't getting some pop-under from my antivirus/firewall or something, and nope, it's just broken on my rig for some reason.

Windows 7 Pro 64 bit
Intel i5, 8 Gig of RAM
GeForce 9800GTX 

That is really odd.
I've tested this both under Windows Vista and Windows 7, but both 32 bit versions.

If you type "g_gametype 8" in the console followed by "map ep_example", does it load the map correctly then? 

That's interesting. Yep, that works just fine.

What does that mean...?

I enjoyed playing through the example map. :) Didn't die, but had to gauntlet a couple of bots.

It would be nice to be able to switch to the gauntlet in this mod whenever you wished--maybe add it to the normal weapon cycle? 

...instead of having to hit the key. 

Personally, I can't wait to see E+ maps on ..::LvL. A number of people have been trying to create Single Player maps over the years and this mod has lot going for it to help mappers make what they want.

Big thumbs up from me for E+ 

you would have said that without advertising for lvl. Or .:. 

Yep, that works just fine.

What does that mean...?

Well, on its own not much, but if you were able to play to the end of the level, set a high score and have that properly saved (check the "games" folder in the entityplus folder, there should be an ep_example.epgame file there) then it's probably not related to saving/reading from that file, which was my first hunch...

I'll think about this a little more... 

you would have said that without advertising for lvl. Or .:.

I'm confused, I guess. He was just making a statement of fact, and not really pimping out the site?

Heck, I could have posted exactly the same thing, word for word. I'm looking forward to seeing SP maps on LvL too.

Maybe unclench just a *little*? :)

Eraser, I checked that folder, and yes, the high score is in there (589), so I'm not sure what's up with starting from the menu. In any case, I'll get started on the map tomorrow night, or over the weekend. I'll probably post any further problems or questions in the Q3W thread, just because it gets a lot more traffic...