The Stoneless website didn't contain much, but the editor itself was released.

ftp://ftp.fu-berlin.de/pc/games/idgames2/utils/level_edit/editors/stls101.zip (1.2 MB) 

Ahh OK. In ToeTag, if I wanted a hot light with a large fall off I would do something like:

"_light" "250 64 150 300"

A little easier to do and better for control since you can input the exact radii that you want to use. Above, that would be a 250 brightness light for 64 units and then a 150 with fall off for the next 300.


You said this to me a while ago when someone was talking about lights. I would really like to know what the resultant light entity would look like in .map format.

Could you tell me :) ?

You see I dont know how the Toetag lighting system works, but I need to reduce the amount of lights in my map (tyrlite wont work on maps with more than 2048 entities, as far as I can tell, and I have an excessive number of lights in my map, many sourced lights have 2 entities or more next to them)

Now I dont know what

"_light" "250 64 150 300"

means, but I do know what

{
"classname" "light"
"light" "300"
"wait" "1.5"
}

means.

When I start using the "delay" key I get confused. I like the effect that Tyrlite gives from "delay" "2", but it seems to produce a massive radius of minlight, which I dont really want......

So I would like to see what

"_light" "250 64 150 300"

looks like in game, and in .map format.

Please help! 

It's basically saying "give me a 250 strength light for a radius of 64, and a 150 strength light with a radius of 300".

Basically just 2 light entities for the price of one. The only technical difference is that the second light doesn't start falling off until the radius of the first light is exhausted (so it fades starting at 64 and ending at 300). 

And MAP format is fairly obvious:

{
"classname" "light"
"_light" "250 64 150 300"
}

You would need my light utility though to use it and, of course, that's missing stuff like LIT support. 

Fuck, let me start over. That description sucks.

It's NOT like 2 light entities, I forgot.

OK, what happens is that you get a 250 light strength casting within a radius of 64. You then get a 150 strength light falling off between 64 and 300. So you get a very hot center surrounded with a cooler falloff.

I hope that's clearer... 

Damn.

Lord - I have re-lit this map once over already, and I'm not happy. I think I know what Im gonna do. Hmmm...

- A result of surfing so close to the damn standard engine limits. I mean Fuck! How was I supposed to know that Tyrlite only allows 2048 entities in a bloody map?!?!

(sigh) oh well..... 

See, this is one of the many reasons I don't condone huge maps. Who needs the hassle? 

I make a new monster and want to give it an attack movement it occurs to me that when I use a mdl object it only uses the first frame.

how do I give the monster a mdl object that poses all the frames in it, and not only the first? 

I have found this strategy to be a useful tact for a Quoth based map set I have been quietly stitching together. Build a huge hull based on just a few thousand or less brushes, after lighting the basic hull, divide it into four or more portions for individual maps that share a common macro architecture. It is actually kind of neat to see a central facade in one map disappear into the distance for the next map. Quoth has a limited hull system that makes this possible, limited but it is enough for the needs of what I'm doing. 

I could split it up, but thats not what I am going to do in this case. I have just ditched a load of lights and re-thought my lighting strategy, and solved the issue! It actually looks better now I think!

The map currently has 32604 marksurfaces. And I keep hitting efrags, but I have used a lot of daft func_illusionaries, and its not to difficult to re-arrange them and fix the problem.

Heh - I'm burning through this one now - could go into alpha in days... 

I used Stoneless to make most of my maps - it wasn't as fully featured as Worldcraft, but I found it to be more stable and nicer to use.

I say "not as fully featured", but I should note that that while it didn't have as many features as WC, it did all the core stuff well and had a few things that were really neat (like templates/instances and WAD editing right there in the editor). Also, it doesn't have any stones.

I believe that the link that lurker posted is the final version, though you'll have a lot of trouble getting it to work properly these days even on windows, presumably because it used D3D back in the v5/6 days. It worked up until Win98/ME but after that I started getting black polys in the 3D view when using texture mode and stuff like that.

I wouldn't recommend trying to actually use it these days (even if you can get it to work), GtkRadiant or Hammer would be much better choices. However, if you're investigating other editors to check out their features and workflow it's definitely well worth a look - again, there's a few features in there that I've not seen in other Quake editors. 

Thanks Fribbles. Are there any screenshots available online? I've never been able to find any. 

http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/screen_shots/stoneless_editor_screens.zip (4.6 MB) 

If I put my dead player in the map, which frames are death frames? When I open the player.mdl in QME I can see the frames, but that doesnt tell me which frame is which because the total frames are split into sequences, so there would be, say, 10 "1s", etc, and I'm confused! 

Ignoring the frame groups.

I think 69 is one of them. And 87?

I had a testmap with them set up, but can't remember now and don't have the map here. 

Lurker: <3

Thanks! And that is ... significantly less cool than I was remembering. Oh well, at least I can stop wondering about it now! :) 

What did the D3D lighting preview look like? Useful or no? 

Not useful at all. It was very low detail, and took so long to render that it was faster to compile the map, run the game and check it properly. 

Stoneless was pretty awesome at the time. Of course, at the time most of the other editors were garbage and Worldcrash was an unstable POS! 

Just count down, lazy bone...

deathframes player.mdl 50 -60 -85 -94 -103
Ricky -70 

How come Quake has lost all its sprites except a few?
Was it because the round tiling looked ugly? Or was the resolution too bad?

I'm trying to put in some new sprites, but just get one frame effects. 

I think Carmack said that they used the sprites during early development but eventually ended up replacing almost all of them with models by the time they shipped.

If you remember that in QTest, wall torches were sprites...

it can certainly handle multi-frame effects though. The rocket/grenade explosion is a sprite. Not sure how that gets set up though. 

i think models and sprites share a similar data format for frames and framegroups. 

Although I'm pretty sure that you can set up framegroups in a sprite, the explosion which comes with quake is not set up like that. The frames are called by the functions s_explode1-6 like regular monster frames are called.

If you set the frame of a model or sprite to a frame-value which contains a framegroup, but the random flag is not set, does it always start from the beginning? If it did, you could change the explosion to a framegroup and save yourself a tiny bit of network traffic!