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EYE of HORUS
Hexen 2 Entities
Queries

An offer from Eric Biessman:

I noticed in a couple of posts that people had questions concerning the entities in Hexen II.

I did this for Hexen also, but I am offering my services in answering questions for people on using H2 entities. I'll even try to help out with map questions if they have any, but just remember that I haven't used a lot of editors besides QuakeEd.

Anyway, all that you need to do is drop me a line at ebiessman@mail.ravensoft.com and I will try and answer your questions.

Again, this is something that I am going to be doing in my personal time, so if I don't get back to you right away, don't take it as an insult. I will do my best to respond to every mail, but you have to realize that if I am swamped, it is going to take a while to get back to you.

The only thing that I ask in return is that you use "Hexen II entity question" as the subject of any mail that you send me so that it will filter into the correct mailbox.

Much appreciated!

For the latest and greatest information on Hexen II Entities, please refer to the resource devoted to the cause: the Eye of Horus!





May/June 1998
Between tiglari and EB regarding func_wall entities in Hexen II:

tiglari: Another question at last; in keep1 in the MP there's a func_wall with various door-ish attributes such as speed & lip; do these actually do anything for a func_wall, or are they just perhaps vestiges of a previous life where this entity was a func_door or something (it's co-targetnamed with some door pieces, so that seems a bit plausible).

Eric:
As for the func_wall question... it was used for single player maps so that you could mark it as !deathmatch. In other words, it would work in single player, and disappear in deathmatch. You could also make it translucent and other fun things. That was before we made the breakable brush do that.

Hope that helped!

And between Phil and Eric on messages:
Phil: Is there any way to customize in game messages and hints as well as the map name? From what I can tell all you can do is use existing messages in the strings.txt file ...

Eric: Anyway, the reason that we needed to make the text file was so that we could easily change the language of the game. This way, all we needed to do was change the text file and the language would be different.

You could add new lines to the text file, but if you use the "message" field, you should still be able to just type in whatever you feel like as the message. Give it a try and see what happens... if it doesn't work, drop me a line and I will see what I can figure out.

Thanks and sorry that it took so long!



Thursday 3/19/98
The following email conversation took place between _MaDMaX and EB regarding water entities in Hexen II:

Max: Phoebus told me I could ask you a quick question regarding water brushes in hexen2. Like I have a room, and i filled half the room with a brush and applied the water texture. I compiled it, and when i'm in the water, everything is ok, but when I surface, ie look at the surface of the water down into the body of the water, it trails and is not transparent. Like a few portal textures that are in the game? that effect when you look at the texture, and you move your head back and forth, side to side, and it sorta blurs/trails with your movement. If I create a water brush and leave it in the middle of a room, say not touching any walls, it looks fine, but when any side of the brush touches another brush, it doesn't draw right. :(

Eric:
Are you running in GL?

Max: yeah. :) btw: do you think it could be the compiling tools I have?

Eric:
I will talk to RJ since this might be more of a programmer problem... What compiling tools are you using?

Max: well i got them of the worldcraft forge site (www.planetquake.com/worldcraft). I got the offical ones by Activision, although i don't see how they are official. Now Autoclaus, who runs the page, says that he uses the unofficial ones, which i haven't tried yet, but might work.

Eric:
Someone else had mailed me saying that they had a problem with Worldcraft and trans water. Make sure that the when you are compiling the vis, the command -watervis is present. Otherwise, the game will assume that the water is making its own portal... I will still talk to RJ and see what he has to say about this.

Max: ok. thats defently it then. well I assume. i'll let you know for sure, but it would make sense, cause i'll i've used so far is just the default compile settings, which doesn't have -watervis on it. So i'll just go advanced and add the line. :) thanks man.

Eric:
That might not be the cause, but give it a whirl and let me know what happens...

Max: right on man. it worked. thanks a bunch. my first time doing hexen2 stuff, but i have done quake/quake2, so it seemed a little weird. hehe. All it took was a quick addition to the vis command line runner in WC. I could just notify Autoclaus about it and he could probably put up a note about it on the WC site so you don't get anymore mail about this. hehe. thanks again

Thursday 3/12/98
Speeed: Great offer, thanks. I have problems when I spawn a single ring of flight from an object, say a chest. If I make the cnt_flight 1 a ring will spawn but more often than not be unusable and not appear in my inventory. If I make the cnt_flight 2 I get two rings both of which are usable. That's pretty much it.....can you help?

Eric: I took a look at what was going on, and I noticed that there was some weird stuff in there. Since we never actually had a spawned ring of flight in the game, it wasn't implemented correctly. We had changed the ring in single player to be an auto use thing, and that is the reason why it doesn't show up when you only have a count of one. Your best bet would be to place a ring, and then build a cool chest of your own around it, so that it doesn't need to be spawned. I know that isn't what you were looking for, sorry.

Sorry that I couldn't give you the answer that you were looking for, drop a line if you need anything else, I'm always willing to answer any questions!

Tiglari: Thanks very much, manual linking is what I have been doing with no problems, although it can get rather tedious for say, entire exploding rooms. I assume this implies that the KILLALL & HIERARCH spawnflags don't do anything.

While building up the Eye of Horus info I've actually come across quite a lot of cases where the code comments seemed to be outdated (the HOVER spawnflag for imps comes to mind offhand), I'd like to go thru it systematically & send a list to be confirmed or denied.

Eric: The harder system should still work, but it is sort of a pain in the but to get to work well. KILLALL means that if you kill one brush, it will take out all of its linked associates, and HIERARCH means that you can set the hierarchy of the brushes. You need to make sure that all of the brushes are touching each other. Then, check HIERARCH for them all and give them a frags value. This number checks which brushes have higher numbers and which have lower numbers. Then, when you destroy a brush, it will destroy the other brushes that have lower frags numbers. It is pretty cool.

Unfortunately, it's been a loooooong time since I even looked at this part of the breakable brush code (I like the target stuff much better so much easier, you know?) that I don't know how well it works. If you run into problems, let me know and I will see what is going on.


Wednesday 3/11/98
Tiglari: Thanks very much for your offer to answer entity questions, I'd like to ask how to set up automatic linking for breakable brushes, something I have not managed to figure out on my own.

Eric: Linking breakable brushes is really quite simple. I looked at the comments that are in the editor and I realized why people are having such a hard time with them. We originally had implemented a pretty overwhelming system to do it, but in the end we did it a much easier way. My guess is that one of the programmers forgot to change the comments in the .hc to reflect the new changes.

It's simple now:
All that you need to do is grab the first brush and target it to the next brush that you want destroyed. If the first brush is destroyed, it will fire off the second brush. If the second brush is destroyed, it will only destroy itself.
You can link as many brushes as you would like using this, but make sure that you don't have too many because it can be a hit when it comes to the game. I've tried to make a quick diagram to show what I mean, but I know that different formatting can screw this kind of stuff up.

Targetname: Ontop
Target: ontop Targetname: Middle
Target:middle

Here's how this diagram would work:

I've talked to the programmers and someone should be making the correct changes to the comment field concerning the breakable brushes.


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