So you give a grunt 'effects 8' and when he dies, he trigger spawns a fiend into his own location. 

Too bad you cant gib corpses this way... have a grunt spawn a zombie or fiend in a spray of gore! 

Spawn a zombie, then after 0.05 seconds spawn a fiend at the zombie's position.

Best way would just be to use qc though so as not to inflate the monster count. 

Would be unwise to spawn large monster from small monster due to bbox Size difference. 

Yeah, qc would be good again to check for !walkmove. 

So, which hack should I write up next:

a) A trigger which randomly selects between triggering "event_a" and "event_b"

or

b) A trigger_counter which can be reset and used over and over again.

I mean, eventually I'll get round to both, but which one should I do first? 

a, though b sounds more interesting. 

i can do a) myself already VERY hacky, i'm most interested in hearing your solution. 

Do b) 

but im sure there is a much more clever solution to it. 

Preach us probably accessing the video buffer for the screen and using the pixel colours as random numbers with 3 info_notnull entities. 

 

// Try it...jump around on any map

void () test_touch =
{
if (other.flags & FL_CLIENT) bprint ("OUCH !n");

};
void () worldspawn =
{

world.touch = test_touch; 

From what I can see, there's been more discussion about the randomised trigger, but more explicit votes for the reusable counter. Since we live on a democratic message board, we will ignore the prevailing enthusiasm and go for the winner instead.

I've been playing around with the idea over the past week, trying to come up with the simplest implementation of a reusable counter. I think I'm basically there now, but one of the features requires a logic gate, and a flaw in my previous article on those has become apparent, so I will fix that first, and then the new hack will follow. 

Another two-fer! 

So the fixed logic gates are up at

https://tomeofpreach.wordpress.com/2013/05/13/new-logic-gate-design/

The updated portion is highlighted in yellow. I've also updated the example .map at http://www.quaketastic.com/files/single_player/maps/gates.zip both to incorporate the update to the article, and to make the example map playable. All four gates are hooked up to example entity systems and can be tested in-game.

Now for the new stuff...
https://tomeofpreach.wordpress.com/2016/02/21/reusable-trigger_counter/
Not only featuring reusable triggers, but also triggers which you can interrupt to reset during their count.

Bonus content: What went so wrong in the original logic gate post to make Preach miss out a vital entity? I often use a "clean" copy of the QC source to test things out. Unfortunately, this clean copy is not quite 100% identical to the basic Quake source, and W_FireAxe is one place they differ. My "clean" version has a call to makevectors which the original Quake progs is missing. This doesn't affect the player code which has some redundancy, but the axe hack entity is not so lucky and started firing in a random direction. The changes to the article work around this. 

When you ask a question and then answer it before anyone had a chance to say something, that's usually a rhetorical device. Not today though, I just happened to crack the puzzle I set myself last time, and made the reusable counter work without a logic gate. Read the follow up article here:

https://tomeofpreach.wordpress.com/2016/02/23/more-reusable-trigger_counter/

Still not enticing enough? Well, the post links to an example .map file, so you can copy-paste the hack without the need to understand it! You want more? Well, the article even invents the anti-counter - an entity which acts like a trigger_relay until you've used it n times, rather than one which only acts like a trigger_relay after you've used it n times. If you want a crusher or trap the player can only activate a few times before recharging it, this does the job. 

All shall bow to the Quake hacks of the one they call Preach. This is Preach's world full of logic gates, high framerate clocks, and waterfalls (That only spawn on nightmare.)

Countless possibilities with this addition, thank you sir. 

Preach, I am in awe. 

I can't even comprehend any of this madness... You're basically the gandalf of map hacks 

or the map hack of gandalfs. 

or the enemy of compatibility... 

or the enemy of compatibility...

Oh believe me, I spent a long time working round map hacks in Quoth - there are specific "shims" for maps which use hacks that subsequent version broke. It's also something that I do bear in mind when making changes to the code base - e.g. renaming OgreGrenadeExplode to MonsterGrenadeExplode would be appropriate in Quoth because Defenders fire the same grenades, but that would break a basic map hack which outweighs the benefit.

For everyone else I think it's worth repeating the standard reminder: Map hacks are for standard Quake only. There is no compatibility guarantee for any other mod. Do not use them in Quoth or AD or anything else. 

Sock had a strict rule that we couldn't use map hacks in AD. Made sense 

I figured it was for vanilla Quake. The only hack that I currently readily use is the nightmare hack. I am currently mapping using AD and the hack works wonderfully. Actually, with triggers like monsterkill I can fix the kill count totals when playing on hard!

I know I use them at my own risk though. ;)