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Easy Entity Modding


Cerez

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Regarding the following intriguing entry in the changelog (that @@mrwonko brought my attention to):

 

Added ability to substitute BSP entities with ones from an external .ent file when loading a map (for easier entity modding)

 

This sounds like an incredibly useful feature. How does it exactly work? Is it available for SP as well, or is exclusive to MP for the moment?

Smoo likes this
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Just be clear that you cannot actually add brush entities ("bmodels") aka triggers, anything that is an entity but you had a brush rather than a point entity/box.  You MAY be able to re-use existing ones but i'm not sure that'd work out so well.  You should be able to edit the ones that exist without changing their model field "*number"

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Well, I've successfully assigned a new cinematic script trigger to a door, added a new NPC entity, and I'm about to try out camera work with newly added reference tag entities. So, at least for scripting, this is incredibly useful. :winkthumb:

 

In fact, it's what I've been missing all these years. I never understood why we had to alter the map (source) files to add NPCs, script triggers, and camera angles to a level. This makes sure we don't need to do that anymore.

 

Update:

 

Adding new reference tags works perfectly! :D Get ready for JKA real-time movie time! ^_^

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Do I need to extract entities from the *.bsp before ?

I would assume so. I think if the ENT file is present, the game will read it instead of what is in the BSP. Though it may read both with a preference on the ENT file's contents -- I'm not sure. @@ensiform?

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Well, I've successfully assigned a new cinematic script trigger to a door, added a new NPC entity, and I'm about to try out camera work with newly added reference tag entities. So, at least for scripting, this is incredibly useful. :winkthumb:

 

In fact, it's what I've been missing all these years. I never understood why we had to alter the map (source) files to add NPCs, script triggers, and camera angles to a level. This makes sure we don't need to do that anymore.

 

Update:

 

Adding new reference tags works perfectly! :D Get ready for JKA real-time movie time! ^_^

 

Actual entities which are brush in radiant based cannot be added.  They can be altered but not added. (trigger_multiple, func_door etc)  They must be compiled in due to how they work other than the key/value pairs.  The model key with the *# tells it which brushmodel to use etc which is not in the entity information.

 

Because entities are encoded into the bsp as well.  So why would you not need to alter the map source file?  The onlyents flag works well too but its sketchy at best since it modifies the bsp file anyway.

 

And yes, you must extract them with the q3map2 flag to export a .ent file.  As it will not just append entities it uses it instead like Raz0r said.

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