I was looking at the Quoth tutorial yesterday and saw that they have facilitated lightning use with the entity trap_fired_lightning (or whatever it is). I may not have got the key name correct whilst sitting here typing but I was definately using the correct one yesterday (it is trap_fired_lightining, isnt it ;). How on earth do you make it fire downwards??!?! It doesn't matter what values I set for 'mangle' or 'angle', it wont fire downwards! Annoying really. I may just end up using the hacks I was gonna use for the lightning anyway, I just thought the Quoth one would be easier!

Any clues?

Ive tried 'mangle' '-90 0 0', '0 -90 0', '-90 -90 -90', Ive tried the same values for 'angle'. None seem to work!! 

http://kell.leveldesign.org/quoth/quoth_tutorial.html#trap_lightning_triggered 

Try angle -2 

If it says mangle in the documentation, that should just work straight up. I will take a look at this for quoth2. 

At the moment, mangle support isn't there, it will be for quoth2. Angles should work, but you'll run into the usual problem of the editor only exporting the yaw component. Your best bet is to add an info_notnull where you want the lightning to strike, give that a "targetname", and give the lightning a "target" key with the same name. 

mangle is the light direction saying "yaw pitch 0"
angle is the cone angle formed by the light

yaw is in [0:360] range
pitch is in [-90:90] range

As exmaple if you want a light that gives a top-down light cone you need a mangle set to 0 -90 0

But it mainly depends of both editor and light tool you are using

and Preach method is as good as it describes it, except it might consume edicts... but I'm not sure about that point...

and it has been saif, read the documentation of the light tool (if it exist)

Hope it helped. 

What JPL says is true, but it only applies to lights, not the lightning effect entity - a quoth feature that sends a bolt of lightning like the shambler's in the direction given. I just through I'd mention that targetting spotlights at an entity doesn't have to actually increase the edict count. Just use an info_null, not an info_notnull, as your target, and it will get removed at worldspawn. This is the distinction between an info_null and an info_notnull, the former is removed when the map is loaded, so it should be used for compiler time purposes like targetting spotlights. The info_notnull is not removed, so it's intended use is as a target for things that happen in game, such as lightning bolts. 

I had alot of problems with the Quoth1 lightning in warpd. Originally the laser blasters all over the place were going to be lighning, but they all pointed in the seemingly random directions no matter what I did with angles nulls etc.

Possibly the edict load was too high and the lightning was firing at other stuff in the edict list. The random angles were always cardinal directions but never where I wanted. Perhaps its for the best since the blaster traps are at least dodgable. 

I can't seem to emulate the cardinal directions only bug, hopefully it's gone in quoth2 or it's just a high entity issue like you say. I've made a test map, which suggests that angles works in quoth, but you'll have to edit the entity file if you want more that a simple yaw, because that's all the editor exports. Also targeted lightning works, which looked broken when I checked out the code for quoth2, but I guess wasn't. "mangle" support is not in quoth but will be in quoth2.

Just posting this to say if anyone else has known bugs like this in the current version of quoth, now's the time to e-mail me or leave a message. If you mention it soon, it'll make it into quoth2, but inter-version patches are unlikely for anything but game breaking bugs.

And yeah, the blaster traps worked really well, enough of a threat that you had to take care, but also useful enough to turn against monsters when ammo was low. 

this is what it says when i load 1.5:
Unable to find default tag file C:/Program Files/GtkRadiant 1.5.0/trem.game/shadertags.xml. No tag support. any ideas on how i can fix this? 

Sorry guys, I've been away for a couple of days - thanks for the cumulative response!

OK - Spirit, erm, yeah, I hope your right!

'angle' '-2'

I'll try that!!!

Preach - Targetting info_notnulls - er, sorry, tried that too, doesnt work (not for me anyway).
BTW, what do you mean by editing the entity file?

As for the editor only exporting the yaw, erm I've been using notepad and a command prompt for tinkering around with this, cause its less stressfull when all your doing is changing key-values!!

Ijed - by the sound of it, you know what I mean!

JPL - easy-to-make misunderstanding! I have loads of spotlights, and lights like

'light' '65'
'wait' '2'

in my current level but as you may have realised by now, I meant lightNing, sorry, not lighting. Although I have been bombarding this thread with questions about lighting and lightning ;)

So in short I can either:

Resort back to using hacks do do the lightning (which did work :) (thanks Preach)

or

Hope 'angle' '-2' works!!! 

A few things that many don't know when they start but;

-1 is up, -2 down for angle keys.

Putting a -1 in the texture scale (instead of 1) flips the texture in that direction. Useful if you've got a written sign and the letters are backwards because of which way round it is.

Negative trigger hurt's give the player health (even though they still scream / do pain fx). It's also past the normal maxiumum.

There's probably other tricks that aren't quite hacks as well; delays for lights (aguirRe's page) or proper hacks; the Teaching Old Progs .dat thread. 

I don't know shit about 1.5 or Tremulous, but have you read these instructions and followed them?
http://tremmapping.pbwiki.com/GtkRadiant1_5-Win32

Seems pretty straightforward...don't miss the part about downloading the missing files, etc.

If you have done all that, and things still don't work, I would suggest asking for help in the dedicated Tremulous mapping forum here:

http://tremulous.net/forum/index.php?board=12.0

...and probably read the guide at the top of that forum as well.

Google is your friend. 

-1 and -2 for angles won't work in this case. It only works for certain entities, namely ones that call the function SetMoveDir(), which correctly reads the angles. The function is designed for creating a unit vector that the entity uses for movement purposes. The lightning doesn't move, it just gets fired, so it uses the angles as they are set. More like a info_intermission(or it will be once mangle works correctly).

http://www.btinternet.com/~chapterhonour/trap26.map
is a map that shows the info_notnull way to set it up. So try copying that.

Entity file: There are some quake tools, like adquedit, that will extract an "entity file". This is literally a plain text file containing the entity data from the map. It looks fairly similar to what you'd see in the map file, but without any of the brush lines for brush entities. The added bonus is that you can then import an edited .ent file back into the map with the same program, so you don't have to recompile it. Furthermore, some engines will automatically load an .ent file with the corresponding name of a map, in the same way they'd load a .lit file. Except this time it replaces entity information, not light information. 

Arches are a pain the arse already, but what I haven't done before is diagonal ones. How do I make it so that it will evenly fit into the space?

Here is a screenshot of where I want a double-arched window.

http://www.esnips.com/doc/61063d95-e191-4e23-87be-81c76859d544/arches

How would you do it? 

Is there any way to just simply add a vert to a line on a brush? Really made life easy in Doom mapping, so I'm hoping for something similar in Quake, but I can't find any way to just simply add a new vert without having to clip the line. 

Kenny, regarding diagonal curves, I made this for you: http://www.jbeck.demon.nl/temp/bobby.jpg 

Apparently a lot of people like a 15 degrees rotated version of the simple curve showed in my pic... here is the 24-sided version of it (linked by bambuz): http://e.photos.cx/czg_arch_baseunit_12-f73.png Anyways this should give you some ideas how to make curvy stuff the right way. 

Why not making a simple arch+wall and rotate it by 45�? 

problem with that is that rotating it would result in all the brushes being off-grid and probably have gaps, creases, and overlaps. 

And why not making a wall and rotate the negative arch by 45� and substract the brushes? 

Im gonna retexture the map you posted and compile it and try it later, but looking at it in notepad I dont understand why the lightning has a 'mangle' and a 'target'. I mean I have tried both of these techniques but not together at the same time, mainly cause the tutorial said to use 'target', 'mangle' or 'angle' - one or the other?!!?

Also you have light entities with:

{
"classname" "light"
"light" "400"
"wait" "1"
"mangle" "0 -90 0"
"angle" "70"
"origin" "-96 -88 384"
}

Surely you could ditch the 'angle' and write

"mangle" "70 -90 0"

Hehe - I was thinking I'll probably end up just using the hack for the lightning anyway cause it sounds better!

Also if I had some small func_trains following a path round in a circular shape (a six or eight edged route), I could source some info_notnull lighning in the middle using the CastLightning style entity, and then target the trains using the 'enemy' key... - voila - Half-Life intro style scene! 

Substracting is just as evil as rotating. 

Just make the shape by eye - all of these fancy tutorials and techniques for making quake-friendly curves dont give true curves anyway. A true circle wouldnt hit a 1*1 grid anywhere (potentially). Use wedge shaped brushes to make the shape, or four-sided brushes with a clipping tool for example. If you can get all of the edges on the grid you can go back and re-make the shape using less brushes. 

If you make the arches as simple as poss, say with two wedges in each corner, rotate by 45 degrees, then use vertex manipulation tool to line the points up on the grid! I dont think you would get any illegal faces because its 45 degrees all the way.