the trigger thing seems pretty easy as long as you aren't running out of edicts. Just place one trigger in the previous hallway to spawn the item. 

So before I write it, has there ever been an OBJ to MAP convertor written? There had to have been, right? I'd love to use MODO to generate geometry that is downright tedious or impossible in Trenchbroom... 

Sharkbanana who can sometimes be found in #qc had a tool for generating q3 .maps that way. I don't know if he wrote it or got it from elsewhere.
it didn't seem to be worth it. too many precision issues or something. tbh, just use misc_model, but then this is q3bsp that I'm talking about, where that sort of thing is possible. 

why don't you have the relevant items .think and call checkclient()? That's certainly not too slow for every monster in the level to call ten times a second. 

ohh yeah, actually that makes way more sense.
checkclient is pretty quick since it's a built in and uses pvs. 

you'll have to filter newly awakened monsters, because they count as clients for one frame to propagate aggro through crowds, but that's simple enough. 

sounds like a pretty good solution. 

I have finished the mr.big model, a rocket jumping, and heavy weapon entity.
Looking in the hknight.qc for the magic to give the gun a "spread" fire action, and in the dog_leap routine for the rocket jump.

The heavy weapon now results in such a damage that even its own entities get killed when placed in the same surounding.
I thought there was a line of code in the ogre.qc that provided this behaviour, not killing own enemy.

Also
SV_startsound:not precached.
How to avoid it? 

SV_startsound:not precached.
you forgot to precache a sound you're using, check all the sound() function calls for any you missed.

not sure about the self damaging, that could be many things. the most obvious thing to check for me would be that you are passing the right entity for the ignore argument in t_radiusdamage. For example, usually it's self.owner, so make sure you set the missile's .owner field correctly. 

thanks necros. I did check the sounds, but strangly only the second monster's call gives the warning.

For convienence, here 's a testmap for MrBig. The qc is included. 

it's the sight sound. that's the only sound that is played outside of the monster's qc file... check ai.qc for the SightSound() method to see which sound is being played. 

Searched the qc.file, but what I find is in void() FoundTarget, what I believe as local float rsnd;.

Is that the spot for SV_StartSound<q/>? 

madfox, ogre grenades can totally kill nearby monsters, it just has such a small weak explosion compared to player explosives that it rarely ever does (dmg is 40, radius is dmg+20). It's not even strong enough to kill a zombie. 

Ah, here's where the confusion is

SV_StartSound is in the engine, don't go looking for that in the QC. The part of the message you need for debugging is where it tells you which sound wasn't precached. If you like, you can then look through the QC for that sound to find out which bit of code is trying to play it. Really though, you don't have to know who wants to play the sound, just precache it in your monster's spawn function so it stops being an error. 

@Lun - sure, but this is no ordinary ogre, it is carying an old fashion 8-loop gun and can flush a spread shot of 20 spikes within 20frames.
I lowered it to 8 on 20fr.
That's a lot of damage, see the test file.

@Preach - can't find it in the qc file, precached all sounds. It might be the player's sound is missing but that's loaded in world.qc.
Is there a console command for this tracing not precached? 

Is it possible in quakec for a client to set temp1 via a console command or alias, and have the server see that and act on it? Not having much luck so far.

I have a function that watches temp1 for change and echoes a simple message, and the call for that function is in StartFrame() in world.qc but it isn't picking anything up. 

use impulses or krimzon_sv_parseclientcommand. 

Thanks a lot. krimzon_sv_parseclientcommand is exactly what I need :) 

So in FTEQCC you can use var to make a global function pointer which can be changed, which is very cool. I was worried earlier on when poking around in the text of a save file that I couldn't actually see an entry for this variable. Now I've managed to actually hit a point where loading a save game causes a "null function" crash to console (hitting the same trigger without loading a save first worked fine).

At the moment the variable in question is storing state which can't be deduced from the rest of the world when the save game loads. This rules out a fix using the LoadGame function to repair the damage. So far I've not managed to think of a better workaround than allocating an entity and storing the function in there. Is this a fundamental limitation of the save game parser - that it's not built to read functions into globals? Is there anything smarter I can try? 

Posted that late at night, in the morning I realised that there was one thing I could test...

The test involves my favourite trick of late, editing the save game that lead to the bug in your text editor. If you add a line "default_monster_spawn" "monster_shambler", the game parses it correctly and the bug goes away. So it's not the loading of the save game that lacks the support. I'll revise my guess that it's the saving of the save game that doesn't support this... 

found in vanillaish pr_edict.c ED_WriteGlobals:
if (type != ev_string
&& type != ev_float
&& type != ev_entity)
continue;
Blame the engine. 

Well, I think I've thought of a not-terrible way to fix up the missing data when a game is saved in this particular case. Must write all this up into a blog post or something though. 

Just in time to make it so that there are blog posts for this month, a new coding article. This week: the Factory Pattern.

http://tomeofpreach.wordpress.com/2014/09/28/the-factory-pattern/

Use it to spawn clones of entities, reset your map cleanly between rounds and ...prevent map hacks? What blasphemy! 

Preach got me interested in Python so I spent time learning how it works and converted my OBJ2MAP C# utility to it. Python is probably going to be my utility language going forward - so nice to work with!

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/161473/SeptQuake/PythonVictory.jpg