trying to credit ppl but cant remember

[Dr. Shadowborg]

But you can't change an ambientsound once spawned....

Which is why null.wav being looped is so damn funny.

I know what is the purpose: you can use it to create an ambientsound for quiet places! Yes, that is it. If you want a sound of frogs, there is one for it. If you want wind, there is another one. If you want no sound at all, you use this.

NEXT!

Haha, yeah =D That'd be worth a DJQuake

Seriously though, if I were to hazard a guess, I'd say that sometime during the development of Quake, ambientsound probably resembled something like the current normal sound() function, and was such that you could actually change the sound on the fly (Likely for testing purposes); however in the fullness of time and development, ambientsound ended up becoming an evolutionary dead end, and the ability to change what sound it played after being spawned was coded out.

And since developers, whether or they're regular modders like you and me, or bigtime commercial game devvers, they can sometimes be lazy or forget about small stuff like replacing a looping null.wav.

[Spike]

Or maybe they coded it all perfectly right from the start and simply forgot to set the looping value to -1... Looping?? nah! set it to 0! (so it restarts at offset 0... doh!)