The open a door thing is a bit straightforward, I was thinking to make some of the more complex horde battles a la Serious Sam - the arena spawns thirty fiends, after you kill ten of them it spawns twenty scrags, once you've killed a total of twenty monsters of either type it spawns ten shamblers and once you've killed all the shamblers the door opens.

And then, if the player runs away they live to fight another day, but if they kill all the monsters a MH unlocks. 

...I could use a hand finishing a DM level if you've got the time and the inclination. Your email in the "people" section seems suss. If interested send to my gmail :) 

So, after a long discussion with aguiRe, apparently WC 1.6 likes to misalign my brushes. What I mean is, I could be working in the .rmf adjusting wedge brushes with the vertex tool. The vertices of the wedge brushes might look perfectly aligned in the .rmf, but in the .map, some vertices are misaligned, sometimes but 8 units or more.

Has anybody else experienced this before? If so, how do you go about working around this?

I'm currently doing my mapping in the .map, but I want to go back to mapping in the .rmf. But with this vertex mishap, I simply cannot. 

It is sometimes necessary to break wedges diagonally into two separate "spike" brushes, like when trying to create a spiral path ala CZG's curves tutorial. 

wc does that because it doesn't check to see if your brushes are valid or not. If you use vertex manipulation, you can totally fuck up the validity of a brush if you so desire, so you need to be careful to keep faces planar and brushes convex. As generic mentions, you can build more complex shapes by splitting brushes with the clipper tool. An interesting feature of worldcraft is that if you split an invalid brush with the clipper, the misaligned vertices will change position.

You can actually create REALLY huge problems with the clipper if you aren't careful though. When clipping multiple selections, be sure not to clip along the face of a brush, as WC will create an infitely small brush that will stop compilers but can be a total nightmare to find. 

Avoid long thin triangles, or ones where the centre handle is close to an edge. 

...split the wedges into 2 triangles with the clipper tool, then readjusted them. Surprised to say, that did the trick. So, for every brush I'm going to adjust with the vertex tool, I should split into triangles first? 

Basicly. It's slow but that the way brushwork is. It depends on how complex the shapes are, for simple terrain you can get away with wedges as long as the centrepoints are fairly central to the brush.

For complex stuff you'll most likely have to break it to four pointed brushes. 

So, for every brush I'm going to adjust with the vertex tool, I should split into triangles first?

not really. providing you keep your faces legal then there should be no need for this.

if you can't figure out what a legal face is then imagine 4 points laid out in a square, like so:

1____2

3____4

and imagine you have a square sheet of thin metal that sits on top of it, meeting each point at the corners.

now, imagine raising point 4 by 5cm or so, and trying to lift one corner of the metal sheet to align with it.. you'll see there's no way to do it without bending the sheet. this is the equivalent of creating an illegal face in your map, so WC ends up trying to correct it when exporting. in order to make it legal yourself, you could either a) raise points 2 & 3 by 2.5cm each, or b) saw the sheet in half diagnonally (clipping equivalent) so you end up splitting the face into 2, which gives you more flexibility (as has been said, 3-sided faces are always legal)

i'm not sure legal/illegal is really the best term but it works :p ..i guess than had it right with 'planar' 

Do you mean you're having the problem with wedges (5-sided) or tetra triangles (4-sided)? 

I pretty much understand now how I should go about adjusting brushes with the vertex tool. I have never used these 2 tools before, clipper and vertex, and this is why I am asking these questions. I have always been a man of carving.

Thanks much for the help rj, generic, than, and ijed. :)

Do you mean you're having the problem with wedges (5-sided) or tetra triangles (4-sided)?

5 sided wedges is what I was having problems with. 

I have a demo on one of the Travail DM levels that I'd like to use as an opener for the mission. Unfortunately, the demo was recorded on a previous version of the map to the release version. The only difference between to two versions is the Text at worldspawn and the CD track number; file name etc remains the same. Is it possible to hack the demo file so it links to the latest version of the level? Alternatively, is it possible to hack the demo file so it plays with a different CD track? 

i don't know how to change the cd track, but you can change the map title by editing the .dem file with a hex editor if the intended title is shorter than the present one (fill the remaining characters with blanks). maybe there's a better way, demo editors for example (e.g. filmat11?). 

several ways to do those things, I'd probably hex patch it as the CD track and message are at the beginning of the demo file. You can probably also use lmpc, demtool or other similar utility (see SDA downloads).

If the demo isn't so big (dzipped), send it to me and I'll try to patch it. 

...you guys are champions, as always. 

I wondered if it would be possible to add a short ingame show-demo like in hexen2 to a map to give the player information about some act-in-game after pushing a button.

Maybe it has something to do with changing the progs.dat, I don't mind, just wanted to know if it's possible. 

It's possible in some sense, but it's not all that easy, and you need some custom code to do it. You might want to check out zerstorer for an example of what can be done, pushing a button in the second level(among the dead) gives you an in-game cutscene of what the button did(in a different part of the map to the player). The main restriction is that you can't actually play demo files as such, without disconnecting the player. So instead you need to recreate whatever you want to demo "live", which might require a lot of custom qc code.

You might also want to look at the "custents" mod, which has some cutscene code supplied already.
http://wartrench.telefragged.com/custents.html
This will allow you to change the player's view to a camera when they press a button, and do some scripted sequences. You might need extra code depending on what you want to happen in the cutscene. 

Does it fairly neatly - but its a big download for your end users. 

Would help if I linked to a download site you could actually download it from, try:
http://hosted.planetquake.gamespy.com/fatty/default.asp?file=custents 

supports an in game camera mode that can be used for scene like actions, (close up of Chthon: "Quakeguy we meet again, but this time I have the
upper hand! See. No lightning rods anywhere!), but as far as demos -- I haven't realy experimented but there is a QuakeC patch somewhere in here:
http://www.gamers.org/pub/idgames2/quakec/
(sorry, having a brain fart over its name)
that lets you trigger cvars so maybe a setup like this would work:
trigger_cvar(entityfield savegame) --> trigger_relay ---> trigger_cvar(entityfield playdemo) ---> trigger_relay ----> trigger_cvar(entityfield loadgame) 

 

This method has potential, but there's a problem with the way you describe it. At the moment, once you load that savegame, the first thing the progs will do is load the cutscene again, as you saved just before that command. So you need another cvar like scratch1 as a check to whether the cutscene has run. Something like

cvar_set(scratch1 1)
trigger_cvar(entityfield savegame)
if(scratch1 == 1)
trigger_cvar(entityfield playdemo)

at the end of the demo stuffcmd "scratch1 0;loadgame"

Then when it loads, the cvar has changed so the cutscene isn't run. 

In the unreleased portion of FMB-bdg (The Imp's Castle) I had used the cut-scene module from Vision by Darin McNeil.

The scenario is that just as the player picks up one of the keys, the view is switched to a camera showing a reinforcemnt troupe of Ogres rushing across the castle courtyard towards the player. So, the player has been warned but he doesn't know exactly when they will arrive.

I works quite well and was very easy to incorporate into the progs.dat. 

Yes, I'd also suggest to take a look at that:

http://www.quaddicted.com/idgames2/levels/v-z/vision.zip 

Thanks for your answers! I asked it on the Quakeplanetforum to check if the dates were changing (they didn't) and got rather cheered off.

I don't care about some coding, but I remember this question being asked earlier. The main reason was demo's need to be loaded in the quake engine before the game starts.
And working with camera's is already a big count on my knowledge.

As for the hexen2 exampel, I thought it was made with the Quake2 engine(?) which has other capabilities. Although I thought Quake and Hexen could go through one slipgate.

I'll check the custom ent mod, and try the others also. I ain't have a straight idea for it yet, but as I found myself at some strange mapping ends I was intrigued by the way it was done in The Portal Of Praevus.