I'm indeed stupid. It should work just fine that way as long as you override the sounds. Or is there anything more to it? If not, please delete me. 

inline models are implicitly precached, so those are not an issue for doors/plats/trains/etc.
while they'll have a model string set, their starting modelindex will be 0, which means they'll remain invisible until they're properly spawned.

regarding sounds, you can just have a second door/plat anywhere else in the map, its sole purpose being to precache the required sounds.

a bigger issue is that if you're using use+targetname, you'll have no way to clear said targetname before the use is called.
this means that plats will need to be triggered twice (one to spawn, once to activate them so that they can be used).
doors are more problematic - you'll need to manually create a trigger field around the missing door to allow it to open, and you'll need to spawn that trigger field the same way as the door otherwise they'll spawn the door when you walk through them the first time. 

Reaching back to this post from 2009 and trying to understand something.

Would this allow for a silent trigger_push? My set up is:

classname info_notnull
use InitTrigger
touch trigger_push_touch
speed 500
angle 90
spawnflags 2
targetname test

Mark V and Quakespasm are still complaining about not caching the ambience/windfly.wav sound file. I thought this was the whole point of this hack.

Thanks! 

Just put a trigger_push out in the void and it will ensure that sound is precached and avoid the warnings. 

Yep, that's in the map off in a tiny room but the hack'd entity plays the sound in that case. 

Yep, that's in the map off in a tiny room but the hack'd entity plays the sound in that case. 

The intent is to make a delayed spawn trigger_push. The sound precache is the reason we have to do something a bit different to the standard "classname as use function" hack, it's what we're trying to work around. But the lack of sound is not intended - I would pair this with a regular trigger_push hidden somewhere in the map to perform the precache and remove the warnings.

You'd have to be pretty creative to get rid of the flying sound, only thing I can think might work is finding an entity hack that sets fly_sound on the player to an impossibly high value using ltime shenanigans on a doctored movetype_push entity. Haven't quite cracked that yet.

On a related note, this has reminded me of an undocumented Quoth 2.2 feature: you can specify the sound a trigger_push makes using the "noise" key. You can create a boiing! noise for jumppads, or using "misc/null.wav" will prevent any sound being made. Will write that one up when I get back... 

Alright. I was afraid of that, but luckily it's for academic purposes not a real project. Great news about the noise keys in Quoth 2.2 That does open up some possibilities. Thanks for the response.

I hope you get a chance to play my 100b4 entry. Lot's of sound work went into it. 

The pack is next on my list, so I'll watch out for it! 

Hey everyone :) So earlier someone on the TB discord asked if it was possible to make a brush that acts like a HL style func_breakable so I did some fooling around and figured out how to do it! Now this is pretty easy stuff that probably isn't really worthy of going here but I'll post about it anyway lol. So here is how you do it, you make a func_wall as you would normally do, then after you've made it you add a few keyvalues to it. First add a takedamage key and set it to 2, that allows it to take damage, obviously. Then you add a health field and set it to however much health you want the breakable to have. Then when it's health reaches 0 it will try to call the function in the th_die field, if there isn't one the map will crash as I found out :D So add th_die and set it to SUB_Remove or any other function that calls SUB_Remove at some point, depending on what your needs are. Optionally you can add an armortype and armorvalue to give the breakable damage resistance so it can be broken with some weapons but not others. I haven't exactly figured out how to customize the sound it makes when you hit it or break it yet but I will keep trying and see if you can do it without needing a mod 

So after a little more discussion I've figured out how to add sound playback to the breakable, so the full setup looks like this:

Func_wall
takedamage = 2
health (whatever you want it to be)
armortype/armorvalue (whatever you want it to be
noise (whatever sound you want the brush to make when you hit it but don't break it)
th_pain = train_wait (plays sound in noise field whenever you hit it)
th_die = SUB_UseTargets (targets 2 separate info_notnull's that play the sound you want to play when the object is broken and removes it, respectively)
target = the name of the 2 notnulls

Notnull 1
targetname = whatever you put in the target field of the breakable
noise = the sound you want to play when the breakable breaks
use = train_wait (play the sound when triggered by the breakable dying)

Notnull 2
targetname = same as the first one
killtarget = name of the breakable
use = SUB_UseTargets (remove the breakable when this gets triggered by it dying)

Please feel free to correct me if something I put is incorrect, I'm still pretty new to q1 mapping and map hacks especially. But map hacks are really fun and I've almost become more interested in them than actual mapping at this point (but not completely though) :P I'm also trying to think of how to add rotation to a turret hack I made last week but I haven't really checked any of the quake c sources related to rotating functions to see which ones I might be able to use 

That's a really well constructed and described hack. Welcome to the thread!

In terms of rotation, a warning and two pointers. First warning is that standard Quake just doesn't do collision on rotation. The amount of highly specialised code that mods apply to get even crude approximation of rotating solids, I wouldn't expect a hack to be able to get anything like collision working.

If you just want visible rotation things are better. There are already suggestions in this thread about how to use avelocity for simple looping animations. If you're looking for something more triggered, you might want to look at SUB_CalcAngleMove. Although any entity which used the function got cut from the final release of Quake, it's still available for hacks to use.

Alternatively, you might want to look into the AI functions if you'd like rotations that follow the player. You need to set quite a few keys on an entity to trick the game into running some of the built-in AI stuff for turning to face an enemy, but it should be possible. More advanced stuff, but something to get your teeth into... 

Having your breakable also create some info_notnulls using external .bsp models for rubble and have a movetype 6 would be cool too. Can't remember a good way to give them starting velocity at the moment though and still be triggered on break. 

Thanks :) I got the idea for the armor from one of your articles https://tomeofpreach.wordpress.com/2013/05/11/trigger_damagethreshold-simulator/#more-974 I may add it to the turrets too if possible. Speaking of, I will definitely look into the AI turning/rotating functions to see what I can do with them 

How can I make worldspawn shootable and killable?
Perfect accuracy gameplay challenge... 

So, I was idly tugging my way through some of the vanilla QC files, and noticed functionality I was hitherto unaware of!

In the blurb for the trigger_once entity, it says this:

if "angle" is set, the trigger will only fire when someone is facing the direction of the angle. Use "360" for an angle of 0.

The code to do this seems to be in there, but I cannot recall a single time in the id1 levels where I noticed this behaviour.

Is this used anywhere in id1, and if so where?

Yours curiously... 

one place is on start.bsp
those 'this hall selects foo skill' centerprinting triggers only display their messages when you're facing towards the teleports. walk backwards into the teleporters and you won't see the messages at all. 

768_negke.bsp
sm179_otp.bsp 

I didn't bother to dig into the whole backlog of messages here, but I made a (fairly simple) hack that allows for killable "static" entities. I've tested this with flames, but not with other things, I suspect that light globes may work.

step one, make a trigger under the player spawn and make it target an info_notnull called "flame". Make sure this info_notnull is some distance from the player, as touching it too early will crash your engine.

Place a "light_flame_large_yellow" somewhere in the map to precache the model.

give the info_notnull the following keys:

targetname flame
model progs/flame2.mdl
frame 1
use func_wall
think PlaceItem
nextthink 2
mdl progs/flame2.mdl


This should now allow you to killtarget the flame entity. Note that static ents don't occupy the edict list, however this hack will. I guess it will also allow for a touch function to be run on it after this point too.

One final thing to consider when using this hack, touching this entity before its had its "nextthink" even by a monster will crash the game. Even shooting the flame will crash it. I suggest spawning them well away from players and monsters.

The nextthink function forces the notnull entity back to a non-solid non-bsp state whilst retaining the flame model. In the example above this happens 2 seconds after it spawns. 

(oh, the trigger should be a trigger once) 

those 'this hall selects foo skill' centerprinting triggers

Blimey, I didn't have to go far then to find one. 

That's a fair amount of work for a killable flame. Rather than messing with thinks and nextthinks and all that, you can just set the modelindex of an info_notnull to that of the spinning flame model (flame2.mdl, check in the console first to see which slot it takes of course) and have a simple displayed model that you can killtarget like normal, no extra futchery with crashing when touched or anything. The flame will automatically do its snazzy little spinning and burning animation, similar to a backpack, and the frame field changes the size with 0 being the smaller flame model (light_flame_small_yellow) and 1 being the larger version. Old example webm here. 

the flame models are static and don't appear in the edict list though? 

They're still given a modelindex, no different from the player or enemy models or worldspawn/brush models. Not sure how to find which model has what number in Fitzquake-derived engines but Darkplaces (ugh) has a handy modellist command that will print out every model currently loaded by the game in order. Worldspawn comes first, then count the list by one. Worst case scenario, experiment a bit until you find the right modelindex and remember to place things in the right order that enemies/health changing by difficulty won't break the hack. 

You might have to make separate entities for different skill levels, with each having the correct model indices for the corresponding skill levels. :/