Ok, it's been long sought after, even promised by a few people. But on Friday I got a snow day, and decided to do something productive with it. So I've made a fgd file which contains essentially all the Quoth entities. Try it now, for free, from:

http://www.btinternet.com/~chapterhonour/quoth2.fgd

This is beta quality, it's not been extensively tested (or spellchecked), and there are probably omissions. If you spot what you think is a glitch or mistake, let me know in this thread, and I'll try to revise it.

The enticing selling points:
* All the quoth monsters, with coopflags and teleport flags added.
* Full listings of the available textures in mapobject_grill and func_breakable rubble objects.
* Hints in the rotating object fields to remind you how to set them up
* Undocumented features???

I also read that GTK Radiant 1.5 supports loading fgd files, so those people aren't entirely left out in the cold. Which is probably best given the weather... 

Woot woot! Thanks Preach! Maybe I'll make ToeTag able to read FGD files as well as DEFs then... 

light_tubelight
light_postlight
light_globe
light_marsh
Cause errors with tyrelight. The color key if not set to zero causes the error (no light emitted). For tube and post lights I've found changing "color" to "skin" in the FGD works. For globe and marsh "skin" does not work no luck with "frame" either. Any ideas?? 

Well, we have a classic conflict here, that both the light tool and the mod claim rights to the field "color". The convention which is meant to be obeyed is that light tools use entity fields which begin with an underscore, and the later versions of tyrlight do just this. The same problem was found in the original quoth thread:
http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=40281&start=150
So if you can track down that newer version of tyrlight then you should be ok.

In a future version of Quoth, I will try to make sure that leaving color unset will enable you to set the frame directly. For now as a workaround, you could use a second light entity in the same place to cast the light. Alternatively, you can build the map without color set, light it, and then reset the color and recompile with -onlyents.

This post was brought to by the american spelling of colour, but grudgingly 

 

Have you guys thought about adding a new entity class that would allow the properties of an entity to be changed? I'm thinking of an entity that, when triggered, would perform a particular operation on a given field of its target entity ("operation" could be set, add, multiply, etc.)

This could enable a mapper to, say, dynamically change an ent's alpha value, or move it, or add health, take away ammo, etc...

Something like this:

{
"classname" "func_<whatever>"
"target" "scrag1"
"targetfield" "alpha"
"op" "1" /* --> add following argument to scrag1's .alpha */
"arg" "0.1"
}

or

{
"classname" "func_<whatever>"
"target" "tele1"
"targetfield" "target"
"op" "0" /* --> set value of tele1's .target to following argument */
"arg" "teledest2"
}

It seems to me [someone who doesn't map, and has a very minimal understanding of QC ;-) ] that it could be useful 

I like the idea! 

there's an official FGD, that means someone can now make a .def!!!!!!1 

WHEN 

I think c_shot2.mdl is a bit gimpy? I noticed it while playing sm149_drew - there's a yellow strip at each side of the base of the barrel.

I opened the model in QME (Lite v3.1), and the tri at that spot seems to be in the wrong place on the skin. It's the most evident in frame 4.

See:
http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/screen_shots/c_shot2.png 

Yeah, good catch! I'll have to fix that for future releases. 

That must mean that the entire pack must be quarantined and eliminated immediately! Shame on you Kell, Necros and Preach! SHAME!!!


I'm kidding. 

The skin in the shot I posted is how it appeared in QME that day. Today, there are almost twice as many tris. Weird.

Is there a more stable modeling app out there? What do you use?

Zwiffle: It's shocking, I know. Almost like these guys are mortal or something. ;) 

My personal approach is to do as little in QMe as possible. So I use gmax to make my model, animate and skin it. Then I export it to MD3 format, and convert it from MD3 to MDL. There are two paths I know of to make that final conversion. Either you can use quark, if you can set it up correctly, but that is a bit of a pain. The alternative is a command line program which I wrote for the purpose.

Once you go down the path of creating your models in MD3 format and converting them to MDL, a lot of options open up because MD3 is a much more popular format. Most major 3d modelling packages have an export to it (3dmax, maya, blender to name 3). The only difficulty is knowing what you can't do in MDL but can do in MD3 - eg MD3 supports multiple skins but MDL doesn't. 

http://www.icculus.org/qshed/qwalk/ 

There is a typo in the official Quoth 2 FGD that causes tubelights not to load.

@PointClass size(-8 -8 -8, 8 8 8) base(Light, Target, Targetname, Static) = light_tubelight : "Tube light"
[
spawnflags(Flags) = [ 1 : "Initially dark" : 0 ]
color(choices) : "Colour of light object" : 0 =
[
0 : "Yellow-white"
1 : "Blue-white"
2 : "Red"
]
]

Also, I am having no luck with the other color options. I get yellow-white every time. (Same for postlights.) The greying out works, however. 

Sorry for the typo, will go fix it on my copy.

As for the color issue, you aren't having the same problem as
http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=60173&start=344
are you? 

I changed "color" to "skin" in the FGD for light_postlight and light_tubelight, and all was good.

Thanks! :) 

of all the threads the bot could have posted on... 

I'm hoping it's pertinent because Quoth Part 3 is about to be released ... ? 

The JPEG artifacts in the otherwise great "stars" skybox were bugging me, so here is a fixed version where I filtered them out using GIMP:

http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/misc/stars2.zip 

how to use that? 

Never mind, found the earlier posts. 

Knight melee attack range (should be when it hit the player, not from miles away).

Drole melee attack range (ditto)

Grenade Enforcer shotgun attack speed (should be less than instantaneous)

Bob Model (this is Quake not kiddie robot TV show).

...these are all broken / bugged. Everything else seems to work. Kthxbye. 

would break balance on existing maps. 

I guess I agree re drole/knight melee

but fuck, leave Bob alone. 

is pretty tough and always seemed a bit unfair for such a grunt, on the other hand it adds some challenge to a group of opponents which is otherwise not very dangerous. 

Would still be very powerful even if the enforcer didn't insta-fire. What are the damage stats for them anyway?? Do any new monsters do LESS ranged damage than the most powerful Vanilla Quake ranged attacks??

Don't forget they have grenades, are tougher, and supported by all the new base enemy too.

Bobs are gay, SCIENTIFIC FACT. They just don't look Quakey enough (most of the other new monsters do). They're annoying to fight but TBH a fixed model that's slightly larger than 3 pixels would fix that anyway. 

I doubt Preach will want to make any changes like that (nor would I) because they would unbalance older maps.

That's not to say I don't agree with some of these. My biggest regret was that all the new monsters are so strong. 

My biggest regret was that all the new monsters are so strong.

Because players are so used to "normal" monsters, because they knows very well how to own them, because players are so experimented now... all these may explain why new monsters are so strong, and why this create a real new challenge for players...

And it does not prevent mappers from using "normal" monster for weakest player in easy skill ;) 

Because not everybody is as skilled as the next one. Even seasoned players. A map should be balanced for everyone, and not punish "weaker" or casual players (admittedly, I made that mistake myself for a while).

All things considered, the Quoth monsters have to seen as supplements, like the occasional fiend or shambler for instance, not replacements for the regular enemies. But in quite a few maps, they are used predominantely in favor of the old ones, which, in the end, just makes the maps very hard and not fun. It's bad design, in my view.

Happens in other games, too. See the ZDoom bestiary, for example. Many of those monsters are terribly unbalanced and, as such, their often great potential is ruined. 

I agree with your instincts on which monsters could be better balanced, but I think some of the fixes need to be different.

Knight melee attack range (should be when it hit the player, not from miles away).

I assume this is for the death guard. The slow overhead swing has quite a long range, but the regular attack has the same range as normal quake knights/death knights. I feel the latter attack is the problem, and so something else makes them harder to fight in melee than death knights. There will be a tweak to the thing I blame in the upcoming patch. Fans of the existing balance will find nightmare unchanged.

Drole melee attack range (ditto)

I think the problem is that the attack is often unavoidable even when you have space to manoeuvre. Droles have a shorter reach than shamblers, so I think monster run speed is to blame. I have an idea on how to give players an "out" without changing either run speed or melee range, but I need to test it first(it might not even be technically feasible).

Enforcer shotgun was tweaked in Quoth 2 to be a bit less dangerous, it was a known issue that we couldn't find a happy solution for. I have had one thought inspired by the death guard business, but again it needs some testing.

We already made a replacement bob model - it's called a sentinel : -P 

We already made a replacement bob model - it's called a sentinel : -P

Yeah... except Bobs are fast, mobile and rapidly firing, and Sentinels are pretty much floating spikeshooters. 

I suspect its the damage being caused too early in the animation of their melee as opposed to the actual range of it.

Playing against them I tend to think I've got a few frames before they'll hit me since the mesh isn't at the extent of its sword swing yet - but then get hit.

Don't mind the Drole though. You let that thing get close to you it's your own fault.

For the shotgun it'd help to telegraph it a bit more - playing a sound a bit earlier would add some very good 'oh shit!' moments and allow player to try and scramble out of the way, taking more damage.

As to enemy balance in general, it's a tricky one. Everyone likes shiny new stuff, especially when they're demons and monsters, shiny with slipgater blood.

So its hard not to get carried away and go too far. On an incremental mod like Qouth you can get stuck and be unable to tweak gameplay because of earlier maps without pissing people off... personally I'd just stomp all previous maps and deal with the backlash... imagine all the glorious map reworks!

In all seriousness though, making the monsters better balanced isn't going to hurt balance as much as you'd suspect. Typically this only breaks things when you make monsters tougher or weapons weaker - essentially the same thing.

Monster are made to die, not to kill the player. 

And B0b... I'm not a massive fan of the mesh either. Maybe removing the eyes would help.

I really liked the 40's robot in Rubicon2 and that didn't feel out of place.

Completely subjective though, and you can't please everyone. 

How much "balance" would be broken if their shotgun blast was split into, say, 6 consecutive shots, and the pre-attack wind-up was made longer?

This would effectively make them chaingun Enforcers... which sounds pretty badass. 

Sentinels are not replacement bobs - bobs are fun to fight, sentinels are not. 

They are okay. Unless they come in groups and without cover. 

 

haha, well, it's funny because the complaints about bob are basically exactly what bob is supposed to be.

He is supposed to be a hard to hit medium threat monster designed to slow down the player and force them to pick their shots. 

Defenders are fine when you are aware of them. Should more be a note to mappers to not be dicks and constantly place them in close surprise ambush positions. In close range with open ground circle strafing works fine.

Bob: "They're annoying to fight" err no, mobile enemies are awesome fun to fight and their death is great. The screechy sound is annoying though :(

I suggest adding:

> A 'non-boss' gug that doesn't have the earth quake attack, because A: unavoidable damage is super fucking lame and B: it makes health balance difficult. Could perhaps have reduced splash radius on it's projectiles, but I otherwise like the gug a lot. The earthquake just makes it too difficult to use as much as Shamblers or Droles :(

> Ammo pack item that doubles shell, nail and Cell capacity (not rockets though, 100 is fine there :p ). Keeping with Quoth's design, it would be a useful item for mappers that make levels with large monster counts but can be happily ignored by those who don't.

> Another item that upgrades the lightning gun making it pierce enemies. With that I think it would be more of a proper super weapon. As it is it's just another tier of nailgun which mappers never use.

> Extra shotgun would balance out the health of most of the new monsters being higher in places where quoth monsters are used more. But again apart from the Voreling I don't see much of an issue with that. You just need more shells :E

> A flashlight with unlimited battery :p 

I suggest all this shit as extra items that could be added so as to not affect any maps already using Quoth too :E 

is a cool attack except that it still damages you when you are swimming. Did he shake the water too? 

Add RMQ. And Zer. And Shrak. 

I think I understand the decision of not releasing the source, now... 

Surely you should conclude the opposite? (: 

now how fun would a modular class system like Unreal's be. 

I like the Gug. He is ridiculously overpowered, but that just means he should be saved for proper crescendo moments. A weaker version would simply dilute the psychological effect of the stronger version.

Re: Flying Base enemies, I think my design preference would be to add another type of enforcer or grunt but give them a jetpack and a hyperblaster or laserbeam attack.

Ultimately, I think what we can all agree on judging by the renewed interest in this thread lately is that Quoth 3 is well overdue. :P 

haha, well, it's funny because the complaints about bob are basically exactly what bob is supposed to be.

He is supposed to be a hard to hit medium threat monster designed to slow down the player and force them to pick their shots.

Fighting bob and the sentinel is ok, but both models suck, look out of place.... Maybe just rip-off or mod Rubicon2 flying platformers, which are ace. 

does anyone have a copy or know where to get the quoth fgd? my backup hdd died a few months ago, and doing a google search for it gives me no results, except for this page and the link is dead :( 

I can't find the Quoth2 fgd anywhere on the net.
Should be the right one but I may have modified something.
file date is 6/14/09
http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?goczizd2h3b8ix3

If it's correct I'll send it to quaketastic

Why FGD & DEF files are not included with the official Quoth dev files? why!
=====================================
BTW does anyone use that scorpion enemy?
and Leave bob alone, he's ok. If anything give me a weaker version of the vorling. One shot kill (there supposed to be bugs right?). How bout a skin and spawn flag for weak vorling and I'll drop 50 of them on the player. 

That would be a horrible design decision. Players wouldn't know which kind of voreling they were fighting, which would be incredibly frustrating. 

:) 

...would probably function about the same as necros zombies, and everybody loved those. To really work though you'd probably need a new skin, new sound set, and maybe even a new model possibly scaled down (which in turn would probably make them look like the terrorbites from time crisis. ehhh....)

Centroids have a few prominent appearances in dom3m1 and the other dom3 maps as well. 

Just change the default one. Come on, surely that's the one change that everyone can agree on. 

nt 

I like the Vorelings as they are and they do their job perfectly: being really annoying, sometimes dangerous and jumping everywhere. 

It's pretty silly having a head crab annoyance enemy thats tougher than a grunt and isn't gibbed by a direct rocket hit :p

But whatever it's an easy enough hack to reduce it's hp within your own maps 

tougher than a grunt and isn't gibbed by a direct rocket hit

At least change that. Dropping it 65 to 50 HP wouldn't unbalance much.

Also, Sentinels, why exactly are those stronger than Scrags? :( 

 

Yeah - those indestructible head crabs really pissed me off in half-life. Why can i blow away a whole alien planet, or whatever, but but a few vorelings are just too much. 

Health tweaks would be fine but they shouldn't be fucked with otherwise, they are one of the most perfectly themed Quake additions ever. Spot on custom monster. 

Just to be clear, Preach is the one working on the patch and gameplay changes and new monsters are outside of the scope of the patch.

Fast zombies worked because it was very obvious what type of zombie it was. it's behaviour was drastically different and immediately apparent. Also, there were no normal zombies in the mix which made things even clearer. Adding a new voreling variant with different health without drastically changing it's appearance and behaviour would be very confusing and changing the original would unbalance existing maps. 

changing the original would unbalance existing maps.

Come on... nobody's saying to give them 1 HP or something, just a very small decrease. 

If the chance is enough to change the gameplay, then it changes gameplay. If it is not enough, then why chance.

- The Mighty Spirit 

Some food for thought, voreling health has already been decreased once, so it's unlikely to drop further. 

OK, time to get things moving. I would like to invite everybody who has created a map for Quoth (1 or 2) to send an e-mail to me - the address is on my profile. I'll reply with a copy of the 2.2 beta and what to look out for. 

 

really excited for a second but sad when it wasn't a real update.
Is the axeman going to be in this update? He's my favourite enemy type from the drake mod by far (Something Wicked made really good use of him) 

The quoth 2 fgd download link is broken!
Y U NO POST A NEW LINK?! 

I have the new fgd ready to go, but it's for version 2.2, so it'll get released at the same time as that (just waiting for the go ahead from testers now). 

Any word on whether or not the mapping guide will be updated? There was a lot missing from it before and I seem to remember Necros acknowledging this. Anyone know if it will be updated? Necros? :) 

Not from me, at least not right now. I don't even have time to do the wiki stuff. 

Due to the ongoing delay, have the updated docs:
http://tomeofpreach.wordpress.com/quoth/tutorial/ 

NVM about that, I already found it when i downloaded hulk256 by Ijed. It's all good now. 

Thanks for those docs. Not sure I'll be using them for now, but I do remember some bits and bobs missing from the old docs when doing my previous Quoth maps.

Quoth is awesome btw :)
Will there be any new content in the new patch, or is it just fixes and small additions to the existing mod? I did test some things a while ago, but that was just map compatibility really. 

Have you ever considered adding the QdQ code for speedrunning Quoth maps? 

I'm not really sure the demand for that would justify the difficulty involved. Adding some code that echoes your time down to the milliseconds would be straight-forward, although a bit strange to expose everyone to it.

The rest of the stuff (setting starting params, grenade counters, extra impulse commands) would require some serious porting for two reasons. One reason is that the the stuff that prints to the screen like the menu and the grenade counter is going to fight with the existing quoth code for the flashlight meter.

The other is that Quoth has made lots of changes to impulse commands and the meanings of the starting param variables (that's where the mapgate and endgate entities store values). So the menus for those would have to be rewritten accordingly. It would be a lot of work, not just a case of including their .qc files. 

Would be interesting, like in Doom. :) 

 

If the digits are realy easy to implement then pls do so in whatever new stuff there ever might be to come out. For runs under a minute a high or low decimal is a big difference wheter improving your run is within reasonable possibilitys.
The other impulses realy arent that important: trigger info/triggers visible is just an exploring thing in most cases you could load the map without the custom progs get a bunch of errors but stil find out what and where the triggers are and do (unless its a negke-hax-map). Ogre grenade timer is pretty horrible since it wil usualy swap to a different grenade then the one you want to jump off, grenade timer, meh most runners can do wihtout, overall it will increase succes rate a bit, but an easy GJ is very doable without and the harder ones usualy require movement anyway so its not like your watching the counter go and press jump when it hits 0, and the fast ones are usualy grenades tossed ahead into your line of movement or bounced of enemies.

Within most of the new engines the realy easy way to do a GJ (throwing a grenade straight up and wait for the second bounce)is actualy pretty hard (unless you script wich im realy against) since you can aim straight up more then in the original engines

If i had the skills i would have made a QDQstats improvement with some extra features:

easyer map exploring:
-tracking of buttons and triggers: a line between the button or trigger towards what it actualy triggers
-impulse to make invisible walls visible
-easyer way to spot secrets
-max damage of explodoboxes

Run comparing:
-a ghost option
-possibility to set checkpoints

-monsters
some form of health display (maybe a colour scheme wich gets brighter the less percentage hp is left)
-a way to track monsters behind walls
-a way to check wich monsters are left after you finished (with an id so you dont only know that it was an ogre but exactly wich one)
-voreballcounter

setting some notifications: did monster #x die?, status of door #x?(did it get blocked?) etc)

Probably forgetting a couple of things i tought of over the last decade but this post is already gettign slightly of topic and out of hand ;) 

Within most of the new engines the realy easy way to do a GJ (throwing a grenade straight up and wait for the second bounce)is actualy pretty hard (unless you script wich im realy against) since you can aim straight up more then in the original engines

This can be fixed in fitzquake at least, by modifying cl_minpitch and cl_maxpitch. -70 and 80 will restore vanilla quake behavior I think. 

I just time it to 4 secs, but this sounds like an easier way. 

for the minpitch and maxpitch values that might come in handy someday 

then you life in a slow world, in my world they explode after 2.5 :) 

My input on quoth was almost nil, apart from a few maps.

Hope you like space hulk :) 

Example map using Quoth info_command
60 seconds of speed

http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?tb0t1vaw3bxhz67 

That's cool. People who have cl_sidespeed and cl_forwardspeed set low may not feel the full benefit of the powerup - but be careful about changing those values to fix it! The danger is in trying to restore them correctly to whatever the player prefers. I think the closest to a good way is to send "exec config.cfg" to the player at the end of the powerup - this restores the values to what they were at the start of the session (with the minor side-effect of also resetting anything else the player has changed this setting ...)

Finally, the powerup won't work correctly in co-op as it is. Is there a way to make it only affect one player? I'm hoping negke might take a punt at that question... 

Preach I agree. I was going to change fov also. fov 60-70 but what to set it back to? exec config.cfg is a good idea. Things like r_wateralpha I think are ok for a map to mess with but fov and others maybe not good. I also think the idea could be extended to a custom file exec custom.cfg to create a custom environment. Setting back to "normal" will be the trick. A way to write all cvar's to file before messing around would be good.

BTW Preach how is the Quoth update coming along? 

I know in darkplaces you can use variables and set command to temporarily save the value of a cvar.

here is an example:

//=============start of example==============
//save current user-set value of cvar
set fov_value $fov
set sen_value $sensitivity
set sound_volume $volume

//change cvar value to whatever you want
fov 999
sensitivity 1000
volume 9999
playdemo demo1

//restore user-set cvar value
fov $fov_value
sensitivity $sen_value
volume $sound_volume
//=============end of example============== 

Yeah, new version is feature complete, it's just the testing and fixing any bugs that have arisen. It's not helped that people keep releasing maps for Quoth faster than I can complete them twice on easy and nightmare. 

new quoth?

GIEF SHINY NEW TOYZ PLZ 

I want to say "the flashlight meter sucks anyway", no offense. Could make it faintly beep or flicker when the battery nears its end -- absorbing the UI element into the game itself.

I always found the flashlight meter to be one of the less polished elements of Quoth. Slapping that consolefont all over the middle of the screen seemed distracting to me.

The less HUD, the better, IMHO. 

flashlight would only be usefull in combination with a magnifying glass so you get a laser like weapon :) What the idea behind the flashlight anyway?i cant think of any uses for it except using it as a melee weapon (no i wont ever come down from my fullbight cloud) 

Does that mean you always play in Fulbright? 

is a little bit of a weird addition IMO.
I can't see myself ever making a flashlight map unless its functionality was more like Half-Life. 

Just an extra option. Agree with go re flickering rather than countdown bar on screen. 

dotn see any reason not to, if i want to see beautifull stuff its not a videogame :) 

This discussion about whether the flashlight should be removed or reworked is kind of getting away from the point I was trying to make, which makes me worried that I didn't explain myself well. The flashlight is one example - the most visible one but by no means the only one - where there is a contention between a resource the Quoth code assumes it controls and the resources that the SDA code assumes has sole control of. This is why they are hard to integrate together. 

I never run out of battery power anyway. 

you should make the battery one of those crank ones... that way you can add a battery crank mini-game using quicktime events. ;) 

zaikor