Well obviously you could do it in qc in three seconds flat, the fun is in the challenge. 

Can you not have something like a func_plat which is moved up and down as currency accumulates or is spent? (With spikeshooters at various vertical distances, firing horizontally, that are interrupted by the presence of the platform) 

I agree that could work, but it's the ability to move it up and down by arbitrary amounts that's hard. Platforms, doors and buttons all move to absolute coordinates calculated at spawn time. Even with a hacked entity which didn't use those spawn-functions, you'd be moving between the pos1 and pos2 keys, which are fixed.

It does also have the old race condition like logic gates made out of doors. On the one end of thing, having to wait for a few frames before a deposit is made is something a player would never notice or mind. On the other though, you're opening yourself up to a double-spend attack... 

'Dynamically'-moving funcs can be done by including a caged monster in the entity (hidden from view and sound). It moves with the func and uses the health or invicibility hack. Then it can be blocked by barriers which prevent the entity from moving onto the next stage until they are removed. 

Yeah, if you can move another entity dynamically you can get a BSP to follow, It's still not enough for an efficient credit system though, because you'd need one more barrier for each credit the player earns. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ6txkumGlM

playing around with trying to make a misc_teleporttrain that isn't MOVETYPE_PUSH (which apparently crashes Quake when telefragging anything except Shub)... I ended up making hologram Quakeguy.

Still no idea how to get this thing to properly move :( 

fyi, figured out how to do what I wanted... MOVETYPE_PUSH is required for a train... but you can bypass the crash if you killtarget the train the moment the enemy you telefrag dies (shub removes the train as well as part of her death functions) 

Here's a map hack article that's been sitting half-finished for months. It's a general article on how to build a trigger_ type entity with very little restriction on the keys you can set.

http://tomeofpreach.wordpress.com/2013/05/13/build-your-own-trigger/

I think most of the regulars who read this thread will know this trick, but hopefully it's a good reference for newer mappers - and there might be some new ideas in the concrete examples of the trick. 

I didn't know that trick, cool! 

 

Could you clarify, are you looking for a hack which fills all the player's ammunition type (easy to accomplish with backpack_touch), or are you trying to increase the maximum ammo the player can carry (almost certainly impossible)? 

 

You'll want to write a short mod to do that then, it's outside what hacks will do for you. Also, be warned that not all engines can display ammo counts above 255 properly, which means the scope for expanding nail ammo is limited. 

can you dynamically change the gravity values?
or set a trigger to change a mobs .target value? 

I think one of the expansion packs has a way to do this but it doesn't work in coop 

You pretty much can't change the gravity with stock quake - there's a way to change it exactly once with a hack if you don't mind that you can't have an exit in your map. It's very common in mods though.

Not sure exactly what you're asking in that second question - you literally want to change the string stored in the target field? It might be better to do what you want with logic gates triggered by the monster instead. 

global sv_gravity cvar, if you have a trigger or some such to issue localcmds.
or .gravity field, if you have a trigger to apply that field to entities within its boundaries.

I've no idea how to utilise either of those without a mod to do it for you.

in some engines (ie: ones that always register custom fields, ie: fte+dp), you can override .gravity on a per-entity basis by just setting the gravity field. Of course, as this doesn't apply to players, projectiles, or movetype_step (unless you somehow manage to get them airborne), all it can really be used for is to confuse the fiend+dog+spawn attack code. Which might be amusing. 

 

the article text won't show up. 

stupid mediawiki can't handle the latest version of some library which I forgot to pin when I updated earlier. will be fixed tomorrow. 

Don't screw it up again... 

Earlier this morning, onetruepurple mentioned an idea for monsters following the player while he had the Ring of Invisibility. I didn't think it possible, but he mentioned that it was done in E4M1.

So I decompiled the map and discovered a trick that I didn't know about and think it's cool enough to share.

It's very simple, if you make a monster target a path_corner, and that path_corner has no further targets, Quake decides that that monster's next movetarget should be entity 1... which just happens to be player 1.

Here's a .bsp and .map showing this effect... don't shoot!
http://quaketastic.com/files/misc/followtest.zip 

I have no idea WHY that works.

self.goalentity = self.movetarget = find (world, targetname, other.target);

Is the relevant bit here, where self is the monster, and other is the path_corner... but why it decides on entity 1 when other.target is empty... it is a mystery? 

Find() must just return 1 if some of the values it's passed aren't valid? 

I wanted monsters to reach the end of their path and just stay there, and so left the target field blank.

But the same happened - they turned and followed the player, ruining the gameplay I was going for.

This is because their movetogoal becomes "" and the player is the last entity added to the server, with that exact name, aka string_null.

I fixed it by giving the path_corners where I wanted monsters to stop a broken target.

Props to Preach for pointing this out.