From mails by American McGee, quoted by Jim Lowell:

8/18/96

     : 1) What's the extents of the Quake world? How big can I make stuff?

     The only hard limit is that your .bsp file cannot be any larger
     than 1.4mb.

     : 2) What's the speed impact of the size of brushes versus the number of
     : brushes in Quake. If I make 100 small brushes, will Quake run at the same as
     : 100 big brushes?

     100 small brushes will draw faster than 100 big brushes. The
     big brushes will be cut up into many small pieces... so you could
     end up with 1000s of small brushes making up your scene. A good
     way to see this is to make a HUGE box room and then turn on drawflat.
     You will see that your four walls (which you made out of four brushes)
     are now being cut into hundreds of smaller brushes.

     : 3) Does the number of lights in the game affect Quake's speed at all? Or
     : does it just slow down the Light process when you build the map?

     It slows down the light process, takes up some memory, but does not slow
     an area down any noticeable amount.

     : 4) When you put in a trigger_changelevel, you give it a mapname for the map
     : to jump to. Is there a way to make it jump to an IP address? Also, are there
     : special keys for the end of an episode? (A secret exit would just be a
     : trigger_changelevel with the map name of the secret map, right? You could
     : even have several secret maps if you wanted, right?)

     Well, this was something that I wanted to have in there, and something
     that I think you will be able to do once you have the registered version.
     I think that you should be able to create an entity that does something
     like this. I will have to ask Carmack though... I know that he and I
     talked about this once, but I am not sure if he said it would be possible
     or not.


     Date: Tue, 23 Jul 1996 17:59:32 -0500

     : 1) Is it possible to make a lift that starts at the top, then moves down
     : when someone steps onto it? I think there's something like this in the
     : Shareware map Necropolis, but I'm not positive. If it is possible, how do
     : you do it?

     Yes, it is. But you need to make it from a DOOR and not from
     a FUNC_PLAT. Just create a door that starts in the "up" position
     and place a trigger over it so that when someone stands on top
     of it it is triggered. Then just make the doors angles point
     down. Pretty simple.

     : 2) So far, when I make a trigger_changelevel and associate it with a brush,
     : that brush disappears. What I wanted to do for an exit gate was to make a
     : teleporter that just exited the map. To do that I wanted to have the swirly
     : teleporter texture in the gate, but the gate is just empty because the brush
     : vanished. Is there a way to do what I want here? (on second though, should I
     : stay away from this kind of thing so that I use teleporter gates
     : consistently?) Also, what does the "spawnflags" attribute do to a
     : trigger_changelevel?

     A trigger_changelevel is a teleporter that exits the map... it does
     not make a flash or anything though. Just draw the brush where you
     want the trigger and then drop another brush with the teleport
     texture over the place where the trigger is. You can put triggers
     inside that "swirly" texture without it causing problems.

     One of the flags makes the trigger silent
     and the other flag turns off the intermission spot
     when someone hits the trigger.

     : 3) Do you have any specs on the entities and what their valid attributes
     : are? I'm working off of a document at
     : http://www.infi.net/~nichd/qmapspec.html, but it's fairly vague on nearly
     : everything. Anything that you had would help a lot.

     Yes, I do... but that's a lot of info. I guess I could type something
     up right now. Maybe I will.

     : 4) Are the info_intermission entities used for the shots at the end of the
     : map (I think so)? If so, how in the world do you aim them? I threw a few in
     : and they all seem to face the nearest wall for some reason. Dumb luck I
     : guess. I tried messing with the angle attribute, but had little or no luck.
     : If you let me know what's up here, I can get Jon to add a direction
     : indicator to Thred so that I don't have to guess which way everything is
     facing.

     Yes they are. You need to set them like this:
     key: mangle
     value: -20 90 0

     I think it is something like pitch, yaw, roll

     : 5) Does Quake have such a thing as an area light or all the lights in Quake
     : point lights? An example of what I'm talking about would be the ability to
     : make a whole brush cast light.

     They are all points. Yeah, I know what you are talking about here...
     I wanted the same thing. No dice. :)

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 Last modified on August 18, 1996  by Jim Lowell - jlowell@winternet.com