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. 

wait is set to -1 on path_corners?
Doesn�t this stop the pathing? 

It does odd things instead, depending if its func_train or a monster_whatever.

Just for RRP guys;

The path code in RRP is more advanced as well; I ported the advanced pathing from extras r4 so there are more control entities for trains, they can be reversed, paused and so on. Wait -1 will teleport a train from one point to another and can be set per path_corner. Additionally, giving a path_corner an event key will trigger whatever targetname it's pointed at, when the train reaches that path_corner.  

11:11:00 | <+Daz> gomap scampsp2! But not idbase kthx
11:11:20 | <+Daz> ikbase!
11:11:25 | <@onetruepurple> and not fucking dapakbase

5/5 bretty good, could use more Tarbabies though 

The reason is because other.target = "".

Find() always starts at the first entity in the list (1, the player).

It checks if the entity's targetname == "" which it does (because players don't use targetnames), so it returns the player. 

if you gave the player a non-empty targetname then the monster would find a different entity to walk towards... 

Thanks for clarifying the reason 

It's been like 6 months since we had a hack. Here's a hack for...Quoth?

http://tomeofpreach.wordpress.com/2014/09/15/quoth-required-message/

Now you can create entities which appear in your map when run under ID1, but not in Quoth. There's one simple application of this, plus the opportunity to go overboard with it instead! 

I was just wondering today how something like this would work. This should be mandatory knowledge for all future Quoth mappers. Thanks, Preach! 

Nice. A much smoother way than the Quoth detection in my levels. 

trigger_relay:
targetname "lava"
target "lava"
delay "0.099"

info_notnull
targetname "lava"
use "boss_death9"

why dis no work? :(
tested with a message on the relay, and it is indeed working, but no lavas. 

The function is not reusable. You might want to killtarget it quickly as well, since it increases the killcount at boss_death10. Note that while the function works without a Chthon in the map, you need to put one somewhere for the splash sound to be precached.

I had an idea for Jam6 that involved the lava splash, too. The opportunity is simply good enough to miss. 

Why is it not reusable? If you retrigger before 0.1 seconds it should just keep spawning particles. 

This thread is a treasure and should be pinned.