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Teaching Old Progs.dat New Tricks.
You know about the info_notnull explosion hack. You know about making monsters drop weapons or alternate ammo using the .weapon and .ammo_whatever hacks. You know about making items float in the air by spawning them on a temporary platform. Let's have a thread where we talk about new ways to use existing behavior and get novel gameplay. If you're a "retired" mapper, this is a great time to do some armchair level design and suggest ideas you'll never have a chance to use yourself.
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Wow!! 
Thats a doosey of hack Preach (and another two-fer no less). I see more awesomer puzzles in the future. 
Random Numbers 
Now, I'm more into my stats than most people, I know that. So for my upcoming random switcher hack, I decided to check just how random it was. I made sure that the hack generated some loggable messages I could parse, ran with -condebug, generated 10,000 random events and loaded them into R.

The results were disappointing. Although the number of "Choice A" and "Choice B" generated were nearly identical, the chance of getting "AA" (an A followed by an A) or "BB" was higher than getting "AB" or "BA" (all four should be 25% probability if the system was fair).

I had spent several nights trying to fix this with various reconfigurations of the entities, but never managed to make significant headway. Then I decided to knock up a quick mod which would spit out A and B into the console using the random() function directly, just to check. And of course it turns out to have this same issue but worse. So I will be releasing this map hack shortly... 
The Most Unpredictible Follow-up Post 
Here's the hack:

https://tomeofpreach.wordpress.com/2016/04/23/the-randomiser/

Whatever will happen next? It's impossible to predict, because I haven't hyped it for months or even thought of it yet! 
Semi-related 
QC support for Notepad++, including Function List support and syntax highlighting: Tutorial & download
Have A Semi-working Hack That I Need A Little Assistance With 
I am making a false train using func_wall and info_null. The purpose is to get a couple of overlapping entities that behave like a train (follow a path).

I have a func wall for the model, 2 path_corners with each other as their targets, a trigger triggering it and an info_null with the following values.

use train_use
think func_train_find
speed 20
modelindex 8
model *1
movetype 8
nextthink 1
target stop_1
targetname me


the odd behaviour is, that when it gets to the first stop, it spazzes out and jumps forward and back among the path corner locations, without traversing them first.

any ideas? 
Possible Tweak 
Hi Shamblernaut, can you try something for me and see if it helps? Change the movetype from 8 to 7. It's a hunch, and it'll take a lot of explaining which I'd rather only type up if it's the correct fix. Thanks, let me know how it goes! 
 
how just about trying to use a true train?..

and yeah, the SUB_CalcMove function, which is responsible for setting up velocities and nextthink for the various pushers to use, is explicitly tied to MOVETYPE_PUSH(7) on account of its use of 'self.ltime' rather than 'time'.

movetype_push and solid_bsp(4) are kinda tied together in many engines too, so be aware that separating the two will often give engine-specific results. 
Awesome 
That worked a treat, thanks preach. I still need to sort out the sound not being precached, but any victory is a victory and I'll take it.

@Spike, using a true train doesn't allow me to overlap my geometry, which is necessary for what I'm trying to do. Also, thanks for the headsup about engine pushtype handling, I guess I'll just require people to run the map in quakespasm =P 
Existing Practice 
movetype_push and solid_bsp(4) are kinda tied together in many engines too, so be aware that separating the two will often give engine-specific results.

Don't all engines need to handle it already because of misc_teleporttrain, which does exactly this? I mean, yeah, it probably shouldn't be written like this, but we work with what we have... 
Teaching Old Preach New Tricks 
 
Preach.dat 
 
Mankrip - Thanks! 
 
Static Entity Shooting Scrag Projectiles 
is this a thing that's possible? I want to use it as an acid drop in my mapjam 7 map (quoth). 
Post #14 
 
Cheers Man 
 
Ahem 
Please use info_trap instead of a hack that we will unintentionally break with a future patch to Quoth. 
Preach 
the scrag / wizard stuff doesn't work with info_trap :( 
Trap Sprung 
Holy Shit 
Preach!

"modelpath" "progs/w_spike.mdl"

I thought that wizard / scrag magic was a particle effect.

my bad.
Thanks. 
To Elaborate 
I was using the scrag shooting function like one would with a info_null as in post #14.

Didn't even consider using the trap function as intended. 
Invisible Water? 
has anybody made water with invisible(transparent) texture, just wondering because that might have some interesting uses. 
Just Try It. 
I'm interested of the outcome. 
Yes 
But using q3map2, so probably not what you're looking for.

h2o 
*waterskip Texture 
 
OH 
fuck, I misunderstood.

I feel like fiddling around in the progs could get what you want fairly painlessly. 
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