Oh boy, more questions!

[SpecialBomb]

Okay, I'm going to come back to my mod here.

So, for the spikes, some of you may be familiar that you are able to put up to 30 spikes in a level per player to set traps and stuff.
This obviously posed a problem, as the more the entities the more the packet size. I decided to re-engineer the weapon to only place 5, but they do more damage that a single spike. I decided to switch the model of the spike with the vore-ball, as a bigger target makes sense for something that does more damage.

My problem arises once you realize that the vore-ball model has effects on it that make it glow and all of that magical shit. That ruins the gameplay of the spikes, as they are supposed to be subtle and not draw attention, and the glow makes it obvious where it is. So, my question is if it's possible to send an ent_message or something to disable the effects on the entity carrying the model? If it can be done, what are some other models that I could use that I haven't thought of? If nothing works, I will just revert to the standard spike.

[TheKillingJoke]

You could use a scaled down Teleport Spike. It Looks similar but it has a Not glowing skin and nö visual effect trail. Alternativly you could Download QME 3.0 and Edit the voreball to have nö effect and another skincolor.

[SpecialBomb]

Well, I dont want to edit anything. I want a stock solution, as my mod is designed to be 100% serverside.

[TheKillingJoke]

Aaaaaaaand of you use the Player head model? Sorry, i don't even know What your Mod will do :-)

Edit: forget that, the head model all have a blood trail. Maybe one of the runes.

[Dutch]

The voreball only glows in DP (maybe other more advanced engines as well, IDK). In faithful engines it simply leaves a purple particle trail, which means DP is replacing the particle effect with a bright obnoxious light. The particle trail is set through a model flag in the MDL file itself. If I'm not mistaken, you have no control of this in QC.

Obviously it won't spawn particles if it's motionless, but in DP it still glows. There is a cvar in DP that turns this off I think, but I can't remember what it's called. Try going to the console and typing 'apropos vore'. This will do a search across all the cvars and commands that include the word vore. Might come up with something.

[SpecialBomb]

Dutch Thanks, I hope it doesnt glow in ezquake, as I am porting my mod to quakeworld soon. At least I know it doesn't glow natively.

[Dutch]

You bet.

Well, I dont want to edit anything. I want a stock solution, as my mod is designed to be 100% serverside.

Don't clients automatically download the entire mod folder with any new assets upon connecting? I seem to remember this when I connected to a CTF server. All of the maps, sounds, and models downloaded through the engine alongside the PROGS.DAT when I connected. I don't remember if this was a DP thing or not.

Anyways, point being is you may want to look into this. If it's the case, then you can put whatever new assets you need in your mod folder.

[Spike]

@Dutch
no, certain clients (ie: ones with download support, including qw and dp) download only the specific files they know about. specifically just the maps/models and sounds that the mod precaches.
Anything else like configs, shaders, textures, lits, etc are unknown to the client and are thus NOT downloaded. The progs.dat will certainly not be auto-downloaded.
FTE and DP do both have special/awkward mechanisms that can allow them to download pk3s instead, but those are engine-specific monstrosities.

@SpecialBomb
If you want DP+FTE to ignore the flags that cause voreballs/etc to glow, you can use the following line:
self.modelflags |= EF_NOMODELFLAGS;
This won't affect other engines, of course, although its possible for other engines to have a different interpretation of it... Those other engines will still have trails though.

[Dutch]

@spike

Thanks for the clarification. Networking isn't my strong suite.