Man, that's a stumper. At least you got reasonably close to your desired effect.

In order for hitscan weapons to hit that custom trigger...I have no idea. 

My stairs are 32*16, so it makes, what, a 22.5 degrees angle? Anyway, there's gonna be action in that room so the player will be on the move and there's not much else to do on those stairs, so I doubt it's gonna be an issue 99% of the time. Thanks for the tip about walls. 

Well, the "chopiness" is supposed to be there. Gliding up and down steps without it will seem weird in Quake. It's not a flight simulator.

You can change to 8 unit steps or just use a ramp, either will work as players expect in Quake. 

I'll try that too, see which solution is best. Thanks again.

@Pritchard Who's gonna have the hitscan weapon, the monsters or player? If the latter, maybe you can add a shootable trigger that will activate the custom trigger? 

It truly does have me stumped. At the moment i'm thinking of various methods to steer the player away from using a shotgun, but obviously nothing can be perfect here either (giving them a weapon/ammo that uses projectiles so that people with game sense or autoswitch will probably be using it, but nothing to stop them switching back mid fight...)

Mugwump, unfortunately we've already tried regular shootable triggers. The issue with those is that, despite the name, monsters don't like to shot them.

A light has appeared at the end of the tunnel, although it is a weak and meager one. I might end up redesigning the playspace to put less emphasis on engaging through the glass, switching back to the traditional triggers perhaps and keeping the glass from being between the player and the enemy. It feels like admitting defeat, but at this point I think i'm ready for it. 

Use a Fiend, he jumps like crazy and has melee attack. Will break glass for sure :D 

Grinding over this particular engagement can lead to demoralizing and risk hurting the remainder of the map. Perhaps even come back to it later and see if anyone else can provide some insight! 

If your monsters don't use hitscans, there's no problem on their part. They can shoot directly the custom trigger. The shootable trigger would only be of use to the player if he uses the shotty.

OR... I know about a mod that turns the shotty into a projectile weapon. Added bonus, visible flying pellets. 

The extra clip stairs did the trick. Movement is as fluid as with the slope AND I don't slide one bit. Awesome, thanks a lot! 

Seems like I've spoken too fast! Apparently I tested the sloped version by mistake, so of course it was fluid. It's weird: even with the extra steps, it's as choppy as without. I also sometimes get momentarily halted by a step if I don't look up the stairs. I'm thinking it might be because I cropped 1 unit on the edge of my stairs at a 45 degree angle. 

The placebo effect in action with those stairs, I guess. I wouldn't worry about it too much, it's important to not get hung up on small imperfections like that. Massive time sink.

The issue with the hitscan-shootable trigger is that when it's between the monster and the player, the monster won't attack. At all. So having the custom trigger would be useless in that situation, as it would never get used.
I don't know about fiends, but I assume the same goes for them.

The projectile shotgun would be nice, but working that into Quoth sounds difficult, if only because I have no knowledge at all in that area of quake content. Would it even be possible?

Anyway, I reworked the entire area. The glass plays a much less important role now, but it plays it much better! I was able to switch back to regular func_breakable brushes, which was better than the hacky mess I had that would crash the game if it wasn't killtargeted as soon as it was triggered...

Now I have a new issue! Does anyone have a .fgd file for Trenchbroom that includes the definitions for the info_logic_* entities? The built in one doesn't seem to have them, and although it's possible to add the keys manually, it's a lot easier to get wrong and I'd feel better having a complete file regardless... 

As far as steps go, you are going to get that "step" feedback...that's just how Ranger's bounding box works. A ramp, as Rick suggested would be the ideal way to have that smooth feedback but then you got the sliding effect.

As far as I know, it is a case of this or that. 

This is EndsWithTen's FGD file. I used it for my base map so it has all of the goodies...plus models!

https://gist.github.com/ItEndsWithTens/200c881f2522af324767be1433c4391e 

Yeah, I think I'm gonna give up and go with the slope. As I said, there's gonna be action here so the player probably won't stand still... I still wish I'd understand why the momentary halts happen though.

Bloughsburgh, yes I know there's bound to be some chopiness, I've been playing Quake since it came out. But the 16-unit steps make it super choppy, with a side dish of getting stuck. Fuck that, it's a slope. Uiiiiii! 

I'm about 90% done with the layout of the Quoth map I'm working on (minus tweaks) but there are a couple issues I want to address since my last compile.

1. Running the map in Quoth seems to make all liquids transparent, which doesn't happen when I run it in vanilla Quake. I was wondering if this is something weird I'm doing or if it's a normal behavior I can turn off, because I don't like the way it looks in my map. The Quoth mapping tutorial doesn't mention this.

2. How do I use a point file in Trenchbroom to find a leak? Nothing in the Help file says how. 

re: 1. I did find the leak (it happened when I raised a floor that I also happened to be using as a ceiling for a room below... probably shouldn't do that), but still, it would be good to know how to use point files. 

In TB 1.16 I go in the File menu and click Load Point File. I assume it'd be the same in v2. 

It shows a yellow line running through your map and you'll find the leak on that line. 

Some editors can display the pointfile, others can't. Just load your map in Quake. open the console and type pointfile.

It helps to turn on notarget and noclip when looking for the leak.

The line of points will start out in the void and zig zag its way to an entity through the leak. 

1. Running the map in Quoth seems to make all liquids transparent, which doesn't happen when I run it in vanilla Quake. I was wondering if this is something weird I'm doing or if it's a normal behavior I can turn off, because I don't like the way it looks in my map. The Quoth mapping tutorial doesn't mention this.

It's probably that a map you've previously played in Quoth set the water transparent, and the last setting gets saved by the engine. Add an info_command_spawn to the map, and give it a "message" key of "r_wateralpha 1". This will force all the water in your map opaque.

If you wanted to make some water transparent, and other parts opaque, that's a different trick which I can share on request. 

I'd be interested in hearing the trick, just out of curiosity to see how it compares to the method I usevin my maps with func_illusionary brushes... 

That's pretty much it, you use func_illusionary combined with *waterskip for the portions that should be opaque, and regular water brushes for the transparent parts. 

Pointfile thing was a big no duh. Whoops.

As for the liquids, that did it Preach, thanks!

Now I just have to figure out how to make the lighting look passable. Time to take a peak at some map sources and see how it's done I guess. 

So I downloaded the JACK fgd, it's a pity it doesn't show the correct models for some entities (all armors look the same, etc.) but it does actually have all the entities, so that's a fair trade.

In other news, i'm jumping from one issue to another with this room. I'm trying to set up some reinforcements to spawn in when the player presses a button, and i want them to at random intervals. I set up a simple gate with a trap, a func_wall and a trigger_multiple to fire an info_logic_random, which is supposed to pick a spawner at random to fire.

Well, it certainly picks something! Using 'developer 8' I found out than when the info_logic_random picks a set to target (it's in branch mode) it also decides to killtarget '', the player. Bit of a showstopper.

Here's the entity setup:

// entity 494
{
"classname" "info_logic_random"
"origin" "3720 808 296"
"angle" "-0"
"spawnflags" "1"
"target" "monspawn2_a"
"targetname" "monspawn2_1"
"chance" "0.5"
"target3" "monspawn2_b"
}


Trust me, I hate the target naming scheme too.

So, any advice? Is this entity just bugged? 

how does one make the waterfall (from dissolution) texture behave like water while still being animated?