It's late, I'm tired; someone explain the 'mangle' key for me one more time.

0 -90 0 points straight down I know.

If I am looking at the XY view i.e. Top Down, what is the mangle for a light to shine towards 6 o'clock dead-level?

I seem to remember a 'right-hand' rule to explain it? 

or yaw pitch roll... i think. 

It's yaw pitch zero. The third number is just a place holder in TyrLite. 

The third number is still really roll as metl said, but obviously rolling a light has no effect whatsoever on it. 

I have no if you're technically right and if Tyrann included computations for rolling the light, but let me copy and paste from the TyrLite readme because I want to wave my dick and show everyone that I'm always right.

"mangle" "# # 0". The first # is the yaw angle, 0 to 360 degrees around the Z-axis. The second # is the pitch angle, 90 to -90 degrees up to down. The 0 is just a required placeholder.

BTW I wonder if it's possible to roll a light if you're on an acid trip? 

Thanks, that's what I was after.

And I now know that zero degrees yaw is at 3 o'clock, and zero degrees pitch is level. 

I have this barrel in .blend from a friend, i want someone to convert this to .mdl, thanks. 

take the blend file, save it to either a 3ds, lwo or dxf format, from there import that file into Qme.

Both blender and Qme can be found linked here:

http://www.quaketerminus.com/tools.htm 

if you need custom game code, a progs.dat file that handles model inclusion so you can test the barrel in game this is as small an example as you are likely to find.

http://www.gamers.org/pub/idgames2/quakec/level_enhancements/ambient.zip 

http://www.gamers.org/pub/idgames2/quakec/level_enhancements/atmos_a1.zip 

Well i didnt make it my friend did, and thats all he said he'll do. 

can be tricky for someone not familar with it, so you can send me the file and I'll convert it.

My address is in here: http://www.celephais.net/board/people.php 

You'd be better off using one of the blender md2/md3 exporter plugins, and then use quark to convert md2(or md3) to mdl. That way you preserve the UV mapping. Alternatively exporting to 3ds and then importing that into gmax gives another suitable conversion path.

Some day I'll get around to writing a mdl exporter for blender... 

for a single frame md2 conversion, but the MD2 exporter is highly unrecommended by most Blender/Quake users. Multiframe animation exports produce some jawdropping distortions in the vertices. 

I would likely consider this simply a problem in the integer/floating point translation of md2 and if you carefully built the models on the grid you should get good results, but this isn't the case here. It is possible to take the very same model that you converted to md2 that results in a distorted model and process it frame by frame into 3ds files and rebuild it frame by frame in Quark and save it to md2 in Quark and the results will be undistorted. So most likely, the problem lies in the md2 importer. 

save it to md2 in Quark

save it to md3 in Npherno and then import it into Quark ;) 

If the 3ds files are accurate, you can just export each animation frame as one of those, and use the MD2 for just a single base pose. Convert the MD2 to MDL format, then import the rest of the frames into QMe as 3ds flies. As long as you've got a model with the same topology as your blender model in mdl format, you can import extra frames in 3ds format to QMe without a problem. The only caveat is that the triangle order mustn't be changed, or you'll get a mess. 

I was trying your model tutorial, and used a newboss tyoe. To my surprise this was the first time I saw the creature in Quake.

But there must be an error in the qc file.

http://members.home.nl/gimli/newboss.qc

*** newboss.qc:18:Unknown value "newboss_stand2"

I'm desparatly dequoted to qc! 

The error means that you're calling the function newboss_stand2 before it's been declared. Because the function newboss_stand2 is further down the QC file than newboss_stand1, the compiler doesn't know that newboss_stand2 is a function. So it gets confused and stops compiling.

The way to fix this is normally to make what is called a prototype. This means putting the following line above the function newboss_stand1

void() newboss_stand2;

This looks a bit like the start of the definition of the newboss_stand2 function, but it doesn't have the function code itself. It warns the compiler we are planning to have a function called newboss_stand2 without defining it yet.

Having said all that, if you try this fix, you'll find that another error strikes, it will tell you that there is already a function called newboss_stand1. This is because you've included two versions in the qc file. Both of these functions do the same thing, but one of them is newboss_stand1 in the shorthand format:

void() newboss_stand1 = [ $stand1, newboss_stand2 ] {ai_stand();};

So delete the first one and leave the quoted one only. Then compile away and it should work.

You may now notice that all the stuff I wrote in the second paragraph seems to be contradicted, as the functions newboss_stand2, newboss_stand3 etc are all calling the following function without prototyping it. This is in fact the last benefit of the shorthand way of writing frame functions, it automatically prototypes the function self.think is set to. This is obviously useful as it allows you to write all the frames in the order they should play without having to prototype everything by hand. I omitted to mention this in the tutorial as I felt explaining prototypes would be too much digression. 

for your answer. I tried with my poor understanding in qc to do as you said.
And indeed the newboss_stand2 gave me a new error.
Also deleting the first one brought me back to another error.

So I compared it with knight.qc and then I had this newboss.qc
http://members.home.nl/gimli/newboss.qc

The only thing it changed it has no errors, but shows newboss at it's first frame. In some way it won't loop to the next frame. 

This one seems to work, although it is quiet a miracle to me, why I first have to shoot to make it animate.
http://members.home.nl/gimli/newboss.qc
For the rest it works fine!

YippY 

That rocks 

a bulking reddwarf in a remote attack move that only starts shooting if I start...

sportive , but I can't kill it without making it flipping in it's start position. 

The reason why your monster freezes until you shoot it takes us on a long tour of the quake AI library. The source of the problem is that the monster spots you right away and so wakes up. However, since it has no attack or run animation yet, it stalls. If you turn on notarget before the monster sees you, you'll find that it animates just fine until disturbed.

So why does it behave differently once you shoot it? Well, it's all about how you change animations. One way of changing a monster's animation is to directly call a frame function like:
newboss_attack1();
or
self.th_missile();
This changes the current frame, and sets a new .think, so the previous animation is interrupted.

If self.th_missile is SUB_Null, then .think is unchanged, so the monster will continue with whatever animation it was doing before, like idleing.


The other way to change an animation is to just change the monster's .think field, like
self.think = self.th_run;
This means the current animation frame is held until the monster thinks again, but then it switches to the new animation. The problem is that if self.th_run is SUB_Null, it's already overwritten the next animation, so the monster freezes.

So as you may have guessed, waking up a monster changes its animation in the second way, the function to blame is HuntTarget in ai.qc. The reason monsters keep going is that their frame functions are always supposed to keep setting another think time and function. If you ever break the chain the monster gets stuck. .th_pain is called whenever damage is taken, which gives a way to kickstart the monster again. By this time the monster is already aware of the player, and so HuntTarget is not called again.

Of course, once the monster is finished it will have a th_run function, and so the problem will fix itself. 

To my surprise the newboss started animating fine, when I turned it around to give myself the chance for notarget.
And stopped when it spotted me.I suppose this should be the moment to make it
shoot a missile, and as there is no code it freezes.

After all my efforts I end up backwards, I had a freezing monster I could shoot alive, now I've got one that freezes in my sight.
I have made a somewhat different qc than in your tutorial, as I couldn't get the error log away.

But now I get a monster what dies as a stand up.I can't find a cause for this. It looks as the animation makes it attack, hurt and finally die with a strange eight frames to make it stand1 again.

I apreciate your patience to explain so clearfully the qc-code. Two days before I couldn't even believe such a thing could spawn into Quake.
I posted the newboss.qc again, maybe you can find the error?