Encompassing Mod for Mappers

[neg!ke]

An encompassing mod for mappers? This is basically what Quoth is about: http://kell.leveldesign.org/quoth/quoth_tutorial.html

So instead of thinking about creating another mod, it would be better to offer Kell a hand, as he is currently stuggling with finishing a new version of Quoth since necros doesn't have the time. This way, some of the features mentioned above could be incorparated as well.

I agree about the 'extra progs.dat for tiny changes' thing (e.g. in bbelief), but then again it has to be taken into consideration that many of the possible hacks (feasible with standard progs) were only fairly recently discovered and preached upon us , so older maps often simply had no other choice than to rely on new progs.
And, yeah, such an encompassing mod could never include every possible feature needed for certain maps - and if a mapper wants to include new monsters or a new boss than it is legitimate to have custom progs no matter what.

I like Preach's idea of a code repository, though, of course, with regard to the spirit of this discussion it is bound to put people off.

[leileilol]

Kinda hard to help a closed source project.

[Lardarse]

Beyond Belief is a good example to me, great, wonderful maps. But as far as I know, the qc change only matters on one map in the episode (the worst one), and it is a fairly common change made.

Beyond Belief has 3 main changes. The one that you refer to (Chthon killable with normal weapons), various fish fixes (gibbable, not counted twice, and IIRC not staying solid for so long after death), and enforcers now only drop 2 cells. Chthon could easily be handled with spawnflags, so that both killable and non-killable types are handled. The fish fixes should be invluded anyway. And as for the cell ammo... Well, I'll repost something that I first said over at QuakeOne:

The biggest balancing factor was meant to be that you got very little ammo for it. Unfortunately, this isn't really true. The first level of every episode where it appears has enforcers, and lots of them. Each one gives you 5 cells when it dies. Even if you don't get every single pack that they drop, it's still very easy to have well over 50 cells by the time you get to the lightning gun. I can begin to understand why Matthias Worch made them only drop 2 cells each in Beyond Belief...

The real reason why he did it, of course, is because he makes the weapon available unusually early, and that he probably wanted to limit its use until more ammo became available. But I can see definite merits to having it that way all of the time...

So a progs.dat that will run both Beyond Belief (and other simple changes that maps may require) is easily possible. It's mainly a case of what you want to be including...

[scar3crow]

http://developer.chaoticbox.com/files/q ... ras_r4.zip

leileilol posted this in irc just a moment ago.

It has some nice features, like raising or lowering water levels, water flowing at varying speeds, particle emitters such as fountains and rain, breakable walls, plats with switches working inside of them to go up or down, the ability to have switches starting or stopping func_trains, or changing their direction. I'm sure it does more. Check it out and check out the example maps.

[FrikaC]

reltest?

[scar3crow]

yeah similar, but looks to have more, and, well, it was compiled with frikqcc

[FrikaC]

I think the main difference is making this pluginable, so that maps can make use of it pretty much regardless of what mod they run under.