have monsters shooting non-standard missiles? 

scampie: yeah, you basically build a monster out of an info_notnull, filling in th_missile and such with whatever attack function you'd like.
as nitin said, neg's map lower forecourt has things like lightning dogs.

jt: nope, only one skin on grunts. 

thanks for confirming 

Yes, it's possible but it's really an ugly hack. One has to keep in mind that the qc monster functions are tied to the animations in the mdl, so creating custom monsters will result in "invalid frame #" warnings and, more importantly, the attacks won't be animated. 

Not having any animation for the attack essentially means no warning before the attack happens, which is unfair to the player. 

Isn't any warning anyway. It just doesn't look very good. 

It is also more of a gimmick, I prefer the stock monster. 

I'm going to release a map entitled 'Made by Spirit' and it will be nothing but spawn that shoot shambler lightning in a tiny box. 

Would it be possible, using info_notnull, to create a zombie that doesn't attack the player but just wanders around? :E

I'm assuming not because it'll just try to call an attack function and crash when it doesn't find it but asking anyway :p 

"th_missile" "plat_hit_bottom"
"noise1" "zombie/z_idle.wav" 

in order to wander around, you need ai_walk (part of the th_walk sequence), unfortunately, ai_walk calls the function that searches for clients which would lead it to wake up and eventually attack you. 

well, just thought of this, but if you made the zombie mad at some monster it couldn't reach, it would just wander around and not attack you (unless you fired at it).
the qc hack to do that is a little annoying though as it relies on edict numbers that change when you're making a map. 

(I know this is a huge bump, I've been 10 days without internet...)

You could even get the zombie to walk in a path by
1) Making it mad at a func_plat instead of a monster
2) Giving that func_plat a health value so that the zombie stays mad at it

Keeping the platform out of sight is important so that the zombie doesn't try to attack it. Giving it a health value isn't too dangerous as long as you leave .takedamage set to 0 (TAKEDAMAGE_NO).

As necros mentions though, the hack to do this relies on entity numbers which means it lacks and resilience if the position of the relevant entities in the entity list changes for any reason (updated map, change in entity counts over skill levels, different mod).

The best mitigation is to ensure all of the entities involved in the hack are the first things loaded from the map - which usually means they should be the first ones added to the map in the editor. If it's too late for that you may want to edit the entity file by hand to achieve this. 

hmm, okay, I might be able to do something with this :)

I take it as soon as the player attacks the effect is lost? Not that that is a major issue. 

 

Is it possible to make shootable funcs_ like buttons not bleed on activation (with stock progs.dat)? 

i don't think so. in order to take damage, an entity needs to have .takedamage set to a non-zero value and blood particles are spawned when .takedamage is non-zero. 

The problem is that spawning blood is a decision taken entirely on the part of the weapon firing code (since explosions spawn none, and lightning burns orange instead). In particular the shotgun and axe code will always spawn blood if they can damage the target, so any hack which prevented the blood appearing will necessarily set .takedamage to zero, and therefore make the entity shootable no more.

There are two interesting alternative though. One would be to make the button shootable only by explosions. For this you wouldn't even have a shootable button, just a func_door to give the illusion of movement. You add a point sized info_notnull next to the button and add the following fields:
"takedamage" "1"
"th_die" "button_killed"
"speed" "1"
"pos1" "self.origin"
"pos2" "self.origin"
"health" "1"
"max_health" "1"

Then make it target the "fake" button and whatever event you want it to fire.

This button can be refired after 2 frames, and you can't add .wait to extend this because the movement functions are intended for a BSP object. So you might need to add a trigger_relay between the info_notnull and the things that it is meant to trigger in order to introduce a delay.

The other alternative would be to make a button that is fired by touch. This would mean a number of compromises need to be made:
1) Anything that touches the button would activate it, like monsters.
2) The activator for the button will be set wrong, which matters if it's meant to wake up monsters or send a message to the player.
3) Hitscan attacks (shotguns, axe and lightning gun) will not activate the button.

If these are all acceptable then start by taking the existing button as a base. Read all the fields which are set in-game using the edicts command. Then change the button's classname to func_wall and add all the fields you read from the edicts command to it manually along with
"touch" "button_fire" 

Hopefully this should be a simple hack, but I couldn't find a clear explanation in the thread. I want to do an action similar to post #11, having lightning fire out of a point entity at a certain direction. However instead of lightning, I want it to be a grenade.

I attempted to do this using the keys and values but replacing them with rockets, but it did not work, as I expected.

So I guess to sum things up, can I have something similar to a spike shooter, that instead of spikes, fires grenades, or any other projectile I want it to?

If I can get a solution, I will post a few screenshots of my current map soon :) 

Someone tell him quick so we get screenies!!! 

post #14? ;)

presumably you could set up another info_notnull for the shooter to target, compile the map, get the edict number and add it in as the shooter's 'enemy' field... 

Is it possible to overload the model field for torches? Perhaps re-directing it to a custom bsp model for, say, a lantern while keeping its sound and light values in tact. 

Might be easier to use a point light and point trigger for the sound along your custom light model (illusionary for static). 

External BSP models don't light properly though... but I guess that for lanterns you could just light them fairly bright and say that it's the light from the lantern that's making them bright. 

To add the lightning sound effect to your map:

Go to the first page of this thread and read post #8 by Negke. If you want to use the sound which was included in the zip with your map, then precache it yourself in the spawn function for the info_tessla. If you want to use a sound which is already precached, then I recommend "weapons/lhit.wav".