Is Than completely retired from Quake mapping? I would love me some ad_plumbers... 

ad_plumbers would be awesome. Course, vermis support would be required so...THAN GET IN HERE

In all honesty I think AD, whatever its direction, is superb. Everything AD touches turns to "ooh look at that!" or "holy crap this is a Quake map!". Too awesome. Thank you for all the fun times AD team. 

Im trying to use the monster_knight "Stone Statue" spawnflag and exactskin as "0" to use the normal knight skin, but its not working. it changes it to any of the other skins, though. am i setting it up wrong? or is this perhaps an oversight? 

I bypassed it by adding an additional skin thats a repeat of skin0 in the meantime. 

Sock for the love of Shub can you fix the "blocking the player when they're hugging a surface that changes angle" bug?? This is actually a bit of an issue in AD cos there's so many maps with cool ledge-shuffling exploration, but going around angles and pillars can be a bit damn fussy with that bug.... Ta x 

Why is everyone taking negke's comment so painfully literally? It was obviously just meant as a (humorously formulated) compliment
Back when I made vanilla quake maps I sent them to negke for testing and he always came back with the same comment, that he is going to give up on mapping after playing my map! I am well aware of the comedy value of the comment, I just don't want new people to be discouraged by his comment because most humour around this forum is very dry and sarcastic! ;)

stop trolling :p ;) Nah, I tried to be clear that overall it's not a bad thing. I might personally prefer it to be different
Yeah I understand your view, though Quake has always been a weird mixture of different styles mashed together. I certainly agree Quoth is the best Cthulhu art style of any community mod for monsters, its just a great shame the gameplay is endless bullet sponges!

I find it a much more interesting aquatic monster to fight than the rotfish and it would make for some very welcome variety in water areas.
I had plenty of plans for water monsters in AD; the hydra from hexen2, more fish types, eels from Quake Expansion pack and 2 new models from madfox. After much testing I decided that water combat in Quake is terrible! Most players struggle with vertical combat and water is an 6 axis nightmare with everything moving really fast while the player is stuck in treacle! Then there is the technical problems of monsters not reacting to water with different movement speeds and engine code wanting to move all monsters to the same Z height as the player.

Im trying to use the monster_knight "Stone Statue" spawnflag and exactskin as "0" to use the normal knight skin, but its not working
Can't be done with AD assets, the QC does not recognize exactskin as 0. Also I don't recommend you use "stone statue" for normal knights, there is a lot of extra code designed for stone enemies linked to that spawnflag. It is really only designed for stone knights.

for the love of Shub can you fix the "blocking the player when they're hugging a surface that changes angle" bug
This is not a QC bug, this is because the players bounding box is square, does not rotate and the mapper has created a tiny (<16 units) ledge! This is a design issue, either the mapper wants a high level of movement difficulty or they do not consider it too annoying. 

I was recently pretty surprised to discover that the "picking up two or more megahealth packs in a row" bug is still present in AD. I think someone came up with a fix a long time ago? 

Okay so I just did my first test map for rotating objects using the AD .fgd! Wow, that was kind of a letdown for obvious reasons(no collision/fake collision).

Not a knock on AD as it's fantastic Mod made with existing tools and played in existing engines. Why haven't the main compilers and engines incorporated rotation with collision into their source?

I guess I mostly mean Quakespasm and Eric's tools. I know about DP already but hmap2 is not widely used so not a consideration really.

I spoke/argued with eric over the engine implementation of rotators in the QS engine for a long time. I wanted the same system as DP used because then it might become a good standard that everyone could use!

Unfortunately the QS team will not implement it because it is not a straight forward change and can affect backward compatibility. Maybe if more people in the community were vocal about this issue then things might change.

Maybe MarkV/Baker could implement the DP rotating system and then someone could make a map for it! That is the usual (crazy) way things have to be done in the Quake community! :P

So for the moment we are stuck with Hipnotic QC hack rotating stuff which is just terrible for 2016 style mapping. Rotating collision can easily handled by the engine and will allow for rotating machinery to properly interact with the player and projectiles. 

I had plenty of plans for water monsters in AD
So... are you saying that you put these plans to rest? That would be a shame, especially regarding the Hydra: this bugger can also attack you when you're out of the water, paralyzing you in the process. That could be used for some interestingly wicked situations.

Then there is the technical problems of monsters not reacting to water with different movement speeds
That's akin to saying "let's not use fiends because they can't navigate stairs and tight spaces properly"... Learning how to use a monster efficiently is the mapper's job. Yours as the project lead is to provide content and gameplay opportunities. Let the mappers deal with these problems. I surely am not the only player who needs tougher and more varied aquatic monsters. 

Could we add necros awesome swinging gate from altar of storms?

QC Hack:
Hrmm, yes having to manually add blocks to create the collision is a cheatyfaced hack by any standard and brings along the ever annoying and long standing issue of colliders not ever rotating hence 45 degrees being 1.44 or so larger than 0. 

 

Learning how to use a monster efficiently is the mapper's job. Yours as the project lead is to provide content and gameplay opportunities.

Wow 

Underwater content, yes, because while AD greatly expands the above-surface bestiary, it still doesn't have more than vanilla underwater. Plus, Sock just admitted having had plans for this. I'm only asking him to consider bringing these plans to fruition. 

He did consider it. Concluded it sucked donkey balls. As the project lead it's his prerogative to make that call. 

I'll see if I can do a true rotation implementation in Mark V in the next few days.

It will need tons of beta testing to assure compatibility. I once saw a Nehahra bug report for a different engine (Qrack) that appeared to involve true rotation and found that to be disturbing.

The main difference is someone interested in doing the QuakeC support (progs.dat game logic for anyone reading this who doesn't know what that is) ... since I almost exclusively only do engine code. Without QuakeC support in an mod that gets use, the engine modification by itself doesn't mean much ;-)

Testing in DarkPlaces would also need to happen to make sure everything works (essentially) the same. DarkPlaces physics code is not the same as the classic engines in some ways, making it unclear at times if a behavioral difference could happen.

/No promises since I haven't thought about it much lately, there could be a red flag I have forgotten, but aside from that possibility, seems very plausible. 

"water combat in Quake is terrible"

I was going to disagree and compare it to something like Descent but the movement speed in Descent is much higher and snappier.

I will still be interested in creating a water map at some point, I'm guessing the scuba gear powerup was included in the 1.5 update? 

That black background issue must be a Windows only problem I think, because all the Linux builds in those same nightly's run AD 1.5 just fine. 

Thanks for your input, xaGe. I got the issue fixed by deleting conchars.lmp as per Sock's instructions. I'd still like to know why this happens only with 1.5 and not with 1.42.

@Fifth Yeah, the scuba gear is featured in Swampy. 

Just swimming alone in Quake is slow and boring, nevermind doing underwater combat. 

swimming alone in Quake is slow and boring
Well, you can't expect underwater movement to be as fast as land movement. As for boring, I respectfully disagree. The limited air supply and search for surface or pockets of air can bring some tension if the map is well constructed. And restricted speed can be another tension-inducing factor in combat situations, further enhanced by hydras and their paralyzing attacks. 

water and swimming can be interesting
i always liked grizzly groto. is very 'other dimension/whatever', with impossible fluid mechanics of underwater areas that should be flooded.

and the map of than 'apsp2' is very good too. 

The mechanic of being able to move water brushes in AD would go a long way I think. I am ignorant on how feasible that would be but I can imagine using the flood/drain gimmick to make interesting scenarios! 

It would be nice to see more water/under water content in maps at some point. If only to add a few monsters. Say repurpose a few more along the lines of the Hexen II squid? A shark would cool, but then someone would actually have to model one.

Underwater sunken, lost, or ruined city type maps would be neat to see I would think. Swim, fight, find rooms still with air under water, etc etc... 

They're allegedly so bad that:

1. necros refused to put them in Quoth.
2. sock opted to do make a fake trigger_touchsound for Zendar that looks and sounds like water. 

Sounds nasty indeed.

I was looking at the trigger_touchsound but couldn't find an example of it. I'll be taking a look at the zendar garden fight section!