i tried opening the .bsp in textedit (the mac version of notepad), and it is all unreadable text. 

 

this is what i get when i downloaded hex editor and opened up a .bsp file:

1D 00 00 00 84 40 30 00 0B 70 00 00 7C 00 00 00
F8 AA 02 00 90 B0 30 00 40 23 0F 00 2C D1 04 00
B0 E9 02 00 FC B4 26 00 85 8B 09 00 DC BA 07 00
A8 54 03 00 84 0F 0B 00 80 3E 05 00 04 4E 10 00

i'm not sure where to go with this. i assumed i should be seeing 'text', like when you open a .ent file.

is there another thread in func somewhere that talks about these things, as i'm starting to veer slightly off-topic with this hex editing query (even though it is still related to corpse removal in the 5rivers map!).

i might get a slapped wrist! 

BSPs are binary files, whereas .ent or .map files are plain text. I don't think you'll want to mess with BSP files directly if you don't know exactly what you're doing. 

is there another way i can alter the corpse_time info?
if not, it's no big deal, i just enjoy fiddling with all these cvars 'n' wotnot. good clean, honest fun! 

not sure what the best way is but you can extract all the entities from a bsp file (proper texteditor should actually work, they are at the bottom of the file; alternatively some engines have commands to dump entities, dp does). then you can save that file as maps/bspfilename.ent (and modify it) and engines with support will load that.

brb removing all tarbabies from negke's maps! 

i didn't read the previous posts, but there is a section in the bsp file which is readable text; this section contains all of the entity data. It looks like a .map file but with no brushes. You can edit it directly (as long as the number of characters doesn't change) or you can copy/paste it into a new file called .map, and then edit that, and then run qbsp -onlyents and light -onlyents to push those changes back into the bsp file. 

A better way to get a proper .ent file is using BJP's bspinfo tool with -copyents. But then, is this really worth the trouble? No need for corpse removal if playing with QS, unless for visual reasons. And isn't there a command in Quoth2 to enable it manually without hacking the map? Sucks the Quoth manual still hasn't been updated with all the additional information (features blatantly missing on the page) scattered around various threads here. 

i've finished the episode now. i enjoyed it, the whole hell doom 3 'mood', so to speak.
i didn't care too much for the ending confrontation. lots of spawning flying twats with instantly hitting lightning, whereby there is hardly anything you can do about it. i'm sure someone out there can obviously do better than me, but..i hate getting smashed about and not having any clear way to avoid/strafe behind cover . i t always feels a tad 'cheap' to me.. 

lots of spawning flying twats with instantly hitting lightning
if you strafe, you can avoid the lightning. 

you're right, but it's a 'distance' thing. get some distance, then strafing does work, unlike shambler lightning..