is it somehow possible to have partial transparent textures in q1 like in half-life? 

not in stock quake. it can be done in tomaz quake with tga textures and alpha channels, but i don't know about any other ports. 

ok - than I built my map without tansparent textures,
because I prefer fitzquake.
necros - thanks for your answer anyway 

I have a strange behaviour with my office PC labtop. I installed FitzQuake and the rendering is quite weird. When the game is launched, there are some weird HOMs-like and flickering effects everywhere... I have to type Ctrl+escape to return to XP, and then click onto the reduced FitzQuake window to return to a "normal" behaviour. So I decided to try also aguirRe's GL Quake, and the game never started (black screen... and Ctrl+Alt+Del to stop it at the end...)
I guess it comes from some missing options I have to set, but which option(s)?: that is the question... Anybody already faced this issue ? Any idea(s) that could help ? 

Can someone clarify this for me:-

There are 8 channels for sound. If I am playing a sound on CHAN_VOICE, can that sound be stopped mid-stream other than using another sound (or null.wav) on CHAN_VOICE. Put another way, if I end up calling more than 8 sounds to play at the same time, will the last sound called 'overwrite' an earlier one.

I am not clear on the use of the sound channels and cannot find much in the way of explanation. I have some Quake C Definitions that show:-

CHAN_AUTO = 0; // Create a new sound
CHAN_WEAPON = 1; // Replace entitie's weapon noise
CHAN_VOICE = 2; // Replace entitie's voice
CHAN_ITEM = 3; // Replace entitie's item noise
CHAN_BODY = 4; // Replace entitie's body noise

For example, should I use CHAN_AUTO or CHAN_VOICE for music. What does it mean by 'create' and 'replace'?

Any pointers? 

FQ failed to load a map and gave a SZ_GETSPACE: OVERFLOW error but didn't crash.

Does this imply that I'm only just over the limit? I had just added 4 ammo packs and 3 health packs, all of which are transported-in after the map starts (player lands on trigger as the map opens). 

I don't know about CHAN_AUTO, but the other channels will kill any previous sound playing on the same channel.

This is useful if, for example, the guy is in the middle of talking and you want him to yelp in pain. It makes no sense to hear them both at the same time.

Regarding the engine stuff, I have no clue. I forgot what SZ_GETSPACE: OVERFLOW means. I think it has something to do with allocating space for strings, and maybe this includes the entire entities string from the bsp, which might have just gone over the limit by adding the boxes? I'd ask Aguirre for sure. 

each entity can have up to 8 channels (?) through which sound can play.

if a sound is told to play on a channel where a sound is already being played, it gets overrode with the new sound.

CHAN_AUTO (0) picks any free channel automatically. 

I notice that CHAN_AUTO is not used very often (8 times in ID';s original) but CHAN_VOICE is used by every monster, the player, door, client and ai.

Does that suggest that CHAN_AUTO is less likely to be overridden and is a better option than CHAN_VOICE.

But could it also mean that if we have (say) 8 weapon firing monsters coming at the player, who is firing his nail gun constantly whilst standing next to two wall torches, near an ambient wind noise, when he activates a trigger that calls a CHAN_AUTO that that sound won't play because there are no spare channels?

I have a global sound that stops mid-stream for no apparent reason other than at the time, there is quite a bit going on. I'm looking for a way to maintain that sound regardless of any other sound that may be called.

For example, if I have a base level and the player has activated an alarm that spawns a steady stream of defenders, I want the alarm to continue regardless of everything else, until the player finds the silence button, which then stops the spawning. If I allow the alarm to go silent too early, the player won't understand what is happening - suitable messages will have told the player what the alarm means.

(That kind of gives the game away, so this message will self-destruct in 15 seconds) 

this message will self-destruct in 15 seconds

But only if the sound does not get overridden. :P 

I'm writing a program that will generate a .MAP file. I'm like to group some brushes. I noticed that in Worldcraft 1.6a, the .MAP file does not have any grouping info but the .RMF appears to. Is it possible to have grouping info in a Quake 1.x .MAP file? If not, does anyone know the breakdown of the .RMF format?

Thanks,
DieparBaby 

That should be "I'd like to group some brushes." 

I guess some compilers support func_group, but there's no real way of grouping anything in the .MAP format.
.RMF is a binary format that as far as I know noone has bothered figured out how works. Checking it out in a hex editor it looks like just serialized stuff, I'm sure it could be figured out one had the dedication. 

It might be best if you made the siren sound a non looping file, and then made the entity repeatedly play the sound at the same interval as the loop did. That way even if the sound was occasionally overridden by other noises, it should keep returning. 

Good idea. 

If you only want the Group information in the .map file (and visible in the editor as a different colour outline of the brushes) then BspEditor has that facility.

Example brush from the .map file:
{
//"0007" "0"
( -128 -512 -48 ) ( -256 -512 -64 ) ( -256 -512 0 ) ROCK18 0 0 90 1.0 1.0
( -256 -512 0 ) ( -256 -384 -48 ) ( -128 -512 -48 ) ROCK18 0 0 90 1.0 1.0
( -128 -256 -64 ) ( -256 -384 -64 ) ( -128 -384 -64 ) ROCK18 0 0 90 1.0 1.0
( -256 -512 0 ) ( -256 -384 -64 ) ( -256 -384 -48 ) ROCK18 0 0 90 1.0 1.0
( -128 -512 -48 ) ( -256 -384 -48 ) ( -256 -384 -64 ) ROCK18 0 0 90 1.0 1.0
}

The "0007" is the Group number and the Group's Index is part of the header information, which gives the Group's name as used in the editor.

In this particular example, the Group's number is 7, which I called Island in the editor and coloured it green. I have 25 Groups in this map (not all of which are different coulours) and I switch off any Group that I'm not working on in the display although the editor saves all Groups at every save regardless of the display.

If that helps? 

Hi Mike:

Thanks for your help. Just two questions.
So "0007" is the group number. Is "0" the group index? That is, if I have 25 groups, will the group indicies be 0 to 24? Can the group number be any number?

Where can I get the BspEditor you use? I don't want to get the wrong one.

DieparBaby 

In my example "0007" is the Group number but I do not know what the "0" is. The index I referred to is a list of the Groups used. Here are the first 9 lines of the file that I used in the example earlier:-

//BSPGROUPS0026
//BSPGROUPINFO"None" "255 255 255" "0"
//BSPGROUPINFO"monsters_easy_only" "192 192 192" "0"
//BSPGROUPINFO"monsters_norm_only" "192 192 192" "0"
//BSPGROUPINFO"monsters_hard_only" "192 192 192" "0"
//BSPGROUPINFO"first_area" "255 128 128" "1"
//BSPGROUPINFO"cave1" "0 255 128" "0"
//BSPGROUPINFO"clip" "255 0 255" "0"
//BSPGROUPINFO"island" "128 255 128" "1"

The first line shows that I have 26 Groups. They are numbered 0 to 25. The first Group is by default called "None" although it can be renamed but it will always be numbered as zero.

The set of three numbers "255 255 255" refer to the outline colour in the editor, in this case it is the default white. I then created the other Groups that you see. I don't know what the last "0" is.

You will find BspEditor here

http://www.bspquakeeditor.com/

If you use the contact button there, the guy who has updated the editor will respond and will be able to give you much more technical answers than I can - I am just a user. 

each entity has it's own sound channels, and the game has a maximum number of channels for sounds.

one entity with a sound playing on channel 1 won't override another entity with a sound playing on channel 1.

but having one entity start sounds on the same channel is useful, for example on doors. that's how they stop the looping sound when a door stops moving, by playing the stop sound on the same channel.

i don't know how many channels the game itself has, but it's not a lot. there may be priority on channels, but i'm not sure. it could just go by which sound was started first. but yeah, if you have any long sound, make sure it's not looped and manually play it again via qc to make sure it never gets cut off.

i believe ambient sounds, started at map load time never cut out, but that's just because i've never noticed that happen. 

I made a mine lamp and wanted to add it as a b_model. But its a *.mdl file.

Is there a program that can make a bsp of it?
http://members.home.nl/gimli/Quake.jpg 

Make sure to add -condebug +developer 1 to engine cmd line and inspect qconsole.log after you've run the engine. What does it say?

What gfx card and OpenGL version is it? Does WinQuake run on it? Does any other OpenGL app run on it? 

I have +developer 1 cvar for sure, but I'm not sure about -condebug. I'm not also sure about gfx card, and openGL version, I have to check it.
I also don't know if another OpenGL application is running at the same time...
Nevertheless, WinQuake is working fine.. while very slow with my current project... (i.e very choppy)
I'll verify all these things by monday, and give you feedback then. 

I'm just wondering if there is any lightmap editor available for q1 format maps. Is it possible to extract the lightmap to images and reimport them into the bsp at all? All I really need is a tool that can increase the brightness whilst still keeping contrast, so a light scale operation would probably also work, but I don't think there are any utils that will do that for me. Does anyone know of anything that can help me? All my maps are too dark on other people's computers because I have such a bright screen...