I have a grasp of programmming syntax and stuff carried over from some PHP'ing, but I'm too weak-minded and impatient to really pursue any coding, even QC (as easy as they say it is) 

I have had a quick look at this rat problem and can see that no matter how you place the rat, he always 'lands' in the map with his paws 8 units below the surface.

I have compared the rat.qc with the dog.qc but cannot see anything obvious (yeah, OK, dogs are bigger than rats), so my question is - what determines the position of the lowest point of the model?

This line

setsize (self, '0 -8 -8', '08 08 16');

can adjust the position but I can only get the rat to 'land' lower. What is the realtionship between the two Z vector values? Also, is there a relationship between these figures and the '$origin' value?

Like MadFox, I am also trying to learn QC.

As always, any help you can give will be appreciated.

Ah, hold on. I have just "aligned" the ents.qc
/*QUAKED monster_rat (1 0 0) (-8 -8 -24) (8 8 40) Ambush
*/

the rat.qc entry
$origin 0 0 24

and the rat.qc entry
setsize (self, '-8 -8 -24', '08 08 40');

and the pretty little rat now sits on top of the floor correctly.

OK Madfox, all we've got to do now is figure out why the little bugger runs backwards and also why, when you shoot him, a corpse appears angled at 90 degrees and why the ghost of the rat continues to run backwards. But hey, we'll get there!! 

I just realized it had to do something with the placing of the rat.mdl
I lifted the rat.mdl with the Quark4.07 model editor, and now it is also on its feet!
I also turned all the frames 180 degrees, and now it is running good.
http://members.home.nl/gimli/rat01.jpg

Great you found it that way Mike!
In the start rat.qc I changed

$frame squishb1


void() rat_stand1;
/*
===============================================
RAT CODE


into

$frame squishb1

void() rat_stand1;
void() rat_run1;

/*
===============================================
RAT CODE


You were right with the dog.qc
I was trying to compare something of the same origin. I know there were more tricks in the Malice convertion.
The rat could also jump and attack.
But I think that needs more knowhow of the Qc-options.
I always thought they just replaced the dog with the rat. But in Malice they come with dozens, without hitting the eddict-count! 

I tried your changes to the rat.qc, and you are right. Only I can't see the mouse walking.
But the model is then placed on the excact 0 grid of the ground brush.
http://members.home.nl/gimli/rat02.jpg

I changed the rat.mdl in the download zip.
It now walks straight ahead, but there is always one I can't kill. Holy Mouse!
http://members.home.nl/gimli/rat02.jpg 

double picture, the last one is ment
http://members.home.nl/gimli/rat03.jpg
for seeing the change in height. 

I think the rat.qc is better now.
They can bite too, only sound gets stuck.
Just 12 mouses, but they're hard to fight.

http://members.home.nl/gimli/rat01.zip 

http://www.planetquake.com/necros/temp/rats.jpg 

Is the Malice QC source not available? I'm fairly sure that would be quite useful in this case :}

(I bet all the links to it would have gone dead years ago though :{ ) 

Can I rip the CD tracks from the Quake1 CD and save them onto my hard drive and get the music in-game or do I always have to have the CD in the drive? If so, how? 

The more recent versions of darkplaces support replacement CD tracks for quake mods, by adding a file sound/cdtracks/trackxxx.wav or sound/cdtracks/trackxxx.ogg to your mod/base directory. xxx is the number of the track, so track004.wav would be the replacement for track 4.

However, if you
a) don't like darkplaces
b) don't like ogg
and/or
c) don't like huge .wav files that wipe out your disk space
then you're pretty much out of luck. I guess for the first one you could try to fiddle with the source code to add the relevant dpextention to your own favourite engine, but that's a lot of effort to save a bit of disk swapping. 

Thanks for the info. I am happy with .ogg, also happy with huge .wav files (I have obscene amounts of HD space) but unfortunately, FQ is my engine of choice.

Oh well, it seemed like a good idea at the time. 

I already search years ago for the Malice qstats. Only Rogue and Hipnotronics give their
SOA.qc and DOE.qc for free.

Could be illigaly of me distributing these rat.mdl! They belong to the Malice convertion,
which is: strictly commercial.

But I like to learn something from the qc programming. That's why I am glad I've got these rats running. I am searching for it a long time now.

Now I am so far I've got them running, there is one thing left.
When I use a Path_corner on them I get blacked out with a :

callo 1446 (?]
ai.qc : ai_run
rat.qc : rat_run1
monsters.qc walkmonster_start_go
(no function)
stack overflow
host error : program error  

lol, of course, just start winamp on the background while playing?
alt-tab to switch songs if fitzquake doesn't support the mp3 menu (don't remember, probably not). 

I have some problems with light textures in my level. The textures look in-game like on the below pictures. They look better after brightening nearly lights, but I don't want too much light there. I have converted this texture with Texmex from ikbaseq3.wad. Maybe I have done it wrong. What do you think?

http://republika.pl/quake_1/light.jpg
http://republika.pl/quake_1/light_1.jpg 

The problem there seems to be that when you converted you used the full quake1 colour palette rather than using a palette which had the fullbright colours taken out.

I haven't used Texmex but have a look if it has a palette with a name suggesting it has no fullbright colours in it.

(In original software quake and later fixed versions of glquake, the last few colours in the Quake palette will always appear at full brightness regardless of the light level) 

If it is a fullbrite issue then you can select the texture, right-click and choose Adjust Brightness, then click Remove Brites.

Don't forget to Save after you have finished adjusting the textures. 

if you make light textures (like a lamp) you actually DO want to have the a single fullbright color patch in the place where the lamp glass is. 

This reminds me... is there any way to turn off the "always-bright" factor of water, so that your lights will light only particular areas of the water? 

I want to have certain monsters 'see' further. I know I can change their range in ai.qc but this then affects all monsters, which I do not want.

Can someone point me in the general direction of the best way to achieve this - ideally by setting a flag on the individual monsters. I may give them a slightly different skin so could use "if skin = 5 then monster can see further" inside the particular monster .qc.

I am not yet clear about the relationship between the monster's own .qc and the ai.qc where the ranging seems to take place.

These particular monsters are to be used as covering fire to pin the player down whilst other closer monsters gang up on him/her. Of course, the better players will survive, and will eventualy get close enough to kill-off the long range slayers. Think of it like snipers shooting from a long way off.

Any suggestions? 

You have a valid point about fullbrights.

But I would note a conundrum about the use of fullbrights:

1. on light textures, fullbrights would spoil a switchable light as it would still be seen even when the light was off

2. many years ago (22Nov1998 to be precice, and some 35 years after the death of JFK, coincidence or what?) I incurred the wrath of Shambler (and him still a teenager) because I had used a fullbright texture on a shootable button. The button was in a dark area of the map but was clearly visible because of the fullbrights being used. Unless, of course, you were using GLQuake (and he was) in which case, fullbrights were not fullbright and therefore became effectively invisible.

So, I guess you pays your money and you takes your choice.

Now, who do you think killed JFK? 

Ankh:

To remove fullbrights from a Q1 texture in TexMex, go to View -> Preferences -> Workspace -> [Color Conversion] and uncheck Use Full Brites. Fullbright texels will be converted to other colors when the image is imported.
The Adjust Brightness -> Remove Brites function doesn't work properly afaik.

Phait:

No

Bambuz:

Not if you want a switchable light style associated with that texture e.g. turning the light off completely.

Mike:

Lee Harvey Oswald 

I have two solutions for you, one of which I have actually tested.

The tested way:
Find the line that reads

r = range (client);

in
float() FindTarget =
and replace it with

if (self.classname == "monster_ogre")
r = longrange (client);
else
r = range (client);

You can use any test in the if statement to decide which function to use. The next thing to do is find the range function and, suprisingly, duplicate it and rename the copy to longrange. You can then change the ranges as you desire. As you probably know from you experiments, the last value is probably the one to change. Altering RANGE_MELEE and RANGE_MID will change how the monster attacks and cause odd stuff, but might be desirable.

This method is good if you only want two classes of monster vision. If you have lots of monsters for the second type of vision, but don't want to have a big, slow if statement in
FindTarget like:

if (self.classname == "monster_ogre"|self.classname == "monster_vore|self.classname == "monster_shambler...)

then add a line saying
self.lip = 1
on all the monsters that have this kind of vision, and check for self.lip in the added code.
(lip is a nice variable to use, as the original quake only uses it for lifts/doors. So you can use it on monsters without having to define a new variable, which wastes memory on every entity in the level)

If you want several monsters all with different vision, and you're sure that you only want to change the maximum viewing distance for each, there is another method. Don't make any of the changes in the first method. Instead, change the line in range from
if (r < 1000)
return RANGE_MID;
to
if (r < (1000 + self.lip))
return RANGE_MID;

Then set self.lip to how much further you want the monster to see, eg: self.lip = 500 would mean the monster sees you at 1500 units,
self.lip = -200 would mean it sees you at only 800 units away, not 1000.
You could have written
if (r < (self.lip))
return RANGE_MID;
Why do it the way I suggest above, and not this way? Because it means that you don't have to change anything for the rest of the monsters, self.lip defaults to 0 so they will default to a range of 1000. Be warned, a mapper could in fact set self.lip on the monsters that don't have a range specified, and it would be obeyed. To avoid this you can force self.lip = 0 in the spawn function of these monsters, but then you're back to lots of work modifying all the monsters.

Finally, note that no matter how negative you make self.lip you'll always have a spotting distance of 500 from RANGE_MID. You could complicate things by having RANGE_MID altered by self.lip in some way too, but this might cause odd behaviour. Since you're going for longer vision this probably doesn't matter, but you might want to consider it. Poke around in the AI.qc and fight.qc files to check what happens at RANGE_NEAR/RANGE_MID. You might find it useful to have these ranges extended somewhat, but probably not. 

I have seen many a QC tutorial with less debt than what you provided. 

Thanks for this explanation - clear and concise. And you are right in that I do not want to affect the current monsters RANGE_NEAR and RANGE_MID settings. It's just the sniper effect that I'm after.


Kell: but what about the grassy knoll and the man seen running away. And what about the mafia who were clearly put-out by what JFK and his brother were doing? And what about the guy in Marseille? And what about Shambler, where was he at the time? 

Mike: heh, I also incurred the wrath in my last speedmap because I did exactly the same thing with a fullbright button in a dark area. :)