ykwim 

Quake Rules AD&D 

Although it offers the least protection, green does take the most damage before it is completely gone. 250 points of damage in one go would wipe out red and yellow armour exactly(and do 50/100 hp of health damage too). 250 hp of damage in a single blow would leave a full green armour with 25 points left(although the player would need a megahealth to survive the remaining 175hp of damage).

If you imagine the 250 damage being dealt out in smaller portions over time, with healing from medpacks in between, then the numbers only change a small amount due to rounding. So the green armour will last you the longest, assuming you have the healing to keep you alive.


As a final aside, it's worth noting that when rounding occurs, the damage to armour is always rounded up, although the amount taken is also rounded up once the points from the armour are deducted. This can be important when you make new monsters with low damage attacks, as 4hp will do no health damage against red armour, similarly 2hp for yellow and 1hp for green.

Sometimes this is undesirable and should be avoided. Knight melee attacks are random between 0 and 9 damage per frame, with an expectation of 4.5 and heavy weighting towards the center. This means they tend to do more armour damage than you might expect from just looking at the total output of damage. The randomisation also means that they don't always do just armour damage to a red armoured player.

On the other hand, in Quoth the pyro does even lower damage per hit, but may hit the player two or three times per frame. This, along with the health pack it drops, helps solidify it's role as an armour stripping monster: after a fight the player will often be as healed or moreso than when they began, but hopefully with a drop in armour protection. 

I have a bit of an issue here. There's a map that I have built a nice map in CS:CZ not too long ago, using Valve Hammer v3.5, and now I'm looking to port that geometry to GTK Radiant to be built for Q3A. However, I have an issue where the geometry doesn't seem to take, for some strange reason. Does someone know how to get the map geometry to be recognized from Hammer in GTK Radiant for uses for games other than it was originally built for? Any assistance is greatly appreciated. Thanks. 

The .map files follow different formats in later versions of Hammer, even though they have the same extension. You might be able to convert from one map format to another using QuArK, if I remember rightly. 

Is there a manner to get rid of the funny counter turning in the path_rotation?

I've managed to get a rather long track in a map with these infopoints, but for some reason the object always turns in counterangle when passing the 360-grid.

I could hide this path rotation, but I wondered for another solution.
Maybe it isn't possible, otherwise it wouldn't be there in the custent with that hide-away turn. 

The angle turning code probably doesn't deal with the case near 360 degrees elegantly, it can be tricky. It's possible that you'll get better results by setting the target angle to be 360 greater than it is. For example, to turn from 330 to 15 degrees the short way, rotating only 45 degrees in-between, you might want to specify the target angle as 375 rather than 15. I've never tested to see if that helps, but I can imagine some ways of writing the code where it would.

You might also try adding additional in-between path_corner entities with angles and positions between the desired start and end points. This might help it work out which direction you want to see it rotate. 

it might be designed to always turn the shorter direction, so if you try to rotate 270 it will rotate -90 instead. So preach's suggestion might solve that. 

I made some testing maps to see why that hide away corner was added.

When making a square with four path rotation, evidently as 90 -180 270 and 360 the last point to 0 or 360 makes a counterclock point.
I tried to overide it with random degrees but the turning always occurs, clockwise or counterclockwise.

When marking with an angle the object gets straightened to that angle, no angle makes the object collide to the new angle.

For sofar I can follow the logic, but as for sitting in a plane it is strange to see the the object fly turning wrong. 

Inded, the 375 worked. There I go with my 360 round. 

Sound Issue

I have a problem switching on/off sounds using play_sound_trigger. I would like to obtain something like this:

- sound 1 is triggered on payer start (it is a loop)
- sound 2 is triggered by a button push, using the same channel as sound 1, hence it should override it.

The effect must sound like a bigmachine sound, that is stopped when the button is pushed... like rotor speed slowing down.

I noticed 2 problems:

1/ when sound 1 is triggered, but the player cannot hear it as too far away (at the beginning of the map, as the player shall enter a base to hear it), then sound 1 is not played, or cannot be heared, not even when close to the source. Pushing the button allows sound 2 to be played as expected

2/ Then I tried to trigger sound 1 close to its source, then it loops without problems, but sound 2 is played, but does not override sound 1

Any idea ??



func_hordespanw Issue
As said in the tutorial, when triggerd, func_hordespawn must spawn monsters that are aware of the presence of the player... but it is not the case in my map: monsters are stucked and wait to see the player before being angry... like if ambush flag has been set.. weird..

Any idea ?? 

try setting SPAWN_ANGRY on the spawner... and it should pass it to the monsters 

1/ when sound 1 is triggered, but the player cannot hear it as too far away (at the beginning of the map, as the player shall enter a base to hear it), then sound 1 is not played, or cannot be heared, not even when close to the source. Pushing the button allows sound 2 to be played as expected

this is a limitation of the quake engine. only looping sounds set up at map spawn time will play properly. looping sounds that are out of the player's range will be cleared from memory.

the only way to do it is to make the looping sound loop manually with play_sound_triggered, setting the toggled flag and setting the 'wait' to the appropriate duration.

as for func_hordespawn/info_multispawn
i believe the monsters spawning awake feature of the entity is broken in quoth2.
you are supposed to be able to set the 'awake' key to '1' and make monsters go after you. 

The awake key doesn't work, even though it is advertised, but lardarse is correct that setting SPAWN_ANGRY on the info_multispawn or info_groupspawn will pass that flag on to any monsters spawned. Probably the forthcoming fix to the awake key will be to apply the same effect as the spawnflag, so give it a go.

I should warn now that there is a subtle bug with the info_multispawn and this spawnflag: it looks for the "activator" at the time of spawning the monster when deciding who to get mad at. The problem is there can be a delay between the activation of an info_multispawn and the actual spawning of the monster(why else would you use one over the teleport spawnflag?). The "activator" might change in that time, in which case the monster could end up mad at the wrong player, or not at all if activator isn't a player. info_groupspawn should be safe from this, and it will be fixed in the next release. 

Thanks a lot for the infos: I'll give a try this morning to:

Sound as necros described... and if does not work, I could simply change the effect.. not a big deal :P

Func_hordespawn: well if not possible to make monsters anger easily (i.e at least for those that need to, and not all spawned monsters), I will simply remove it and replace it by normal triggered monsters.

Thanks men: you rock ;) 

The spawnflag goes on the info_groupspawn(which is the new name for a func_hordespawn), so you can do it selectively - only on the ones for which need awake monsters. So what you would like to do is possible, the bug I described doesn't apply to what you want to do. 

I tested the wait field in play_sound_triggered, and it worked well. I had to remove loop indicator in the .wav sound to make it properly. Well, the result is quite acceptable, while there is a small sound break (around a 10th of a second) when the sound is triggerd again, and sthen restarted... maybe an engine issue... :/

BUT, it is not yet possible to stop it with another signal that overrides it onto the same channel, I guess it is a Quoth issue there...

So I removed the wait field, and added a trigger_delay that loops on the initial trigger with the exact sound duration for the delay field, enabling the sound loop as it triggers again the play_sound_trigger.
Using a button push, it allowed me to kill the trigger_delay, then breaking the loop: as a result the second sound can be heared: done !!!

Don't know if it is clear :P

Well, I still have some minor improvement to add in order avoid some sound glitches, but at least it works ;)

Still have to work on spawning ;)

Thanks a lot for the help provided :D 

How do you avoid this:
http://gaetm.free.fr/3d/2008/UnearthlyChallenge/VC_Pb.jpg

The vertex light fucks up between 2 ground meshes, works better with lightmaps, but I'd rather be using vertex light. The actual vertices are all overlapped fine etc, can bake vertex light perfectly in maya/max... Any idea? 

Are those all static meshes? One thing to try would be to turn off shadow casting on the ground meshes since they won't be shadowing anything anyway. That will stop their corners from turning dark. 

And the sidewalks as well. That's probably what's boning you. 

Yeah they are all static meshes, thanks I'll try tonight! 

the reason play_sound_triggered isn't stopping the sound when triggered again is because you haven't set the sound channel.

the default for that entity is to use channel 0. channel 0 basically tells quake to use whatever channel is available to play a sound.

the way the entity stops a sound playing is it plays a 'silent' sound on the same channel, but if the channel is set to 0, then the engine just chooses another channel instead of cutting off the one already playing. to get it to work, you need to set the 'impulse' key to a value between 1 and 7 (inclusive). 

I did it, but it does not work, I'm pretty sure I'm missing something

Nevermind: as I already exceed some standard limits in this map (clipnodes, max marksurface, max visible leaf, max faces), I will certainely exceed edicts as well, so unfortunately, I think I will not save that much there...

Anyway, I'll give it a try with a test map ;) and thanks a lot for the support. 

Is it possible to create a new monster skins without creating a whole new PAK file? Can you simply throw them into a directory structure of some sort and have Quake use them? I'm guessing not since the textures for the standard creatures are embedded inside the MDL files but I figured I'd ask. 

textures without .mdls or .mdls without .paks?

You can have stuff loose no problem, but AFAIK skins must be inside a model unless they are external skins - high rez or some such.

But that means the mapper can't turn them on or off, they're always on, or they're not, engine side.