OffWorld Transport
written by Phlem<WOS>

Information regarding the LOX Off World Transport system.

What Is It?

What is the offworld Transport system?  In short, it is a way to embellish your existing or new Quake2 maps so that players can jump into a teleporter and pop out on a whole different server.

You can add the special entities for this into a new map.  But the most practical way to do this is to simply add the entities to an entity file for the map you want to use.  In this way you can update your existing maps, even stock Q2 maps like q2dm1.

This feature is available starting with version 1.12.10 of LOX. 

How Do I Use This Feature?

To make use of the feature, you will need to create entities for your map files.  See Deacon's excellent concise guide here: ent.htm

To add a specific offworld teleport pad to your map, you will need a few details:

• The X, Y, Z coordinates of the location you wish to place the pad
• The descriptive name of the server you want to jump to
  (e.g. "Loxophilia - Q2 LOX - Main WOS Clan server")
• The address of the server, including port number.  Note that this can be numeric or a qualified domain name
  (e.g. 2.3.4.6:27910 or phlem.ath.cx:27910)

Once you have this information, you can build an entity to be added to your entity file for the map you are updating.

For the above example, I would end up creating an entity that looks like this:

{
"message" "Offworld transport to\nLOXophilia\n(72.5.249.99:27910)"
"wait" "3"
"sounds" "2"
"target" "q2@72.5.249.99:27910"
"origin" "20 -2583 -471"
"classname" "misc_offworld_teleporter"
}
 

In the above example, the user would see three lines of text when they approach within about 6 "virtual" feet of the offworld teleporter pad:

Offworld transport to
Loxophilia
(72.5.249.99:27910)

The "\n" characters in the message variable are interpreted as NEWLINE characters.

It's that simple!  Just add this above segment to your entfile and you are ready to go!

Detailed Example

STEP 1 - Create Basic ENT file

Let's try this using our trusty and reliable q2dm1 map as an example.  First, we need to create the ENT file for q2dm1.  Per Deacon's instructions in the ent.htm page, we can use the ENTDUMP.EXE program on Windows (or the equivalent 'entdump' program on Linux), to create our file.  This example assumes the ENDUMP.EXE program is installed on your system in some directory that is in your search path, such as C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32.

From the Windows command line, we might follow a sequence like this (note that the typed commands are in bold type):

C:\>  cd \quake2

C:\QUAKE2> mkdir entfiles

C:\QUAKE2> cd entfiles

C:\QUAKE2> entdump c:\quake2\baseq2\maps\q2dm1.bsp > q2dm1.ent

You should now have a q2dm1.ent entity file that is several lines long.  My copy was  955 lines long.  The file should look something like this at the top:

{
"sounds" "7"
"classname" "worldspawn"
"message" "The Edge"
"nextmap" "q2dm2"
}
{
"origin" "984 192 784"
"angles" "25 72 0"
"classname" "info_player_intermission"
}
{
"noise" "world/drip_amb.wav"
"spawnflags" "1"
"classname" "target_speaker"
"origin" "244 -236 332"
}
{
"noise" "world/drip_amb.wav"
"spawnflags" "1"
"classname" "target_speaker"
"origin" "244 36 332"
}
{
"noise" "world/drip_amb.wav"
"spawnflags" "1"
"classname" "target_speaker"
"origin" "940 628 420"
}

 

HELPFUL HINT Number 1 - If you are trying to create entity files for maps that are stored inside of a PAK file, you may need to extract the map binary files, the BSP files, from the PAK in order to get ENTDUMP to work on them.  You can use a program like PAKRAT to do this.  PAKRAT can be found on Deacon's Tomb and other locations as well.

 

STEP 2 - Collecting our Ent Data

In the simple example, we showed this entry for a teleport entity:

{
"message" "Offworld transport to\nLOXophilia\n(72.5.249.99:27910)"
"wait" "3"
"sounds" "2"
"target" "q2@72.5.249.99:27910"
"origin" "20 -2583 -471"
"classname" "misc_offworld_teleporter"
}
 

What we need to do to make this entry work for our q2dm1 is to simply get the coordinates correct and then tack this little section of text onto the bottom of our newly created q2dm1.ent file.

To do this, per the instructions in Deacon's ent.htm page, we can use viewpos.  Get your favorite server to run the map you are working on, then connect your regular Q2 game program to the server and move your character to the location where you want to place your offworld teleport pad.  Remember, too, that you can place as many pads as you want, so collect data from lots of locations if you want to.

At this point, type "viewpos" (for View Position) in the console.  It will return a string similar to this:

(1268 654 494): 13

The first three digits are the ones we care about.  The first digit is the X coordinate, the second is the Y, and the 3rd is the Z.  For my example, I went into the middle of the round open area in q2dm1 to get my coordinates.  To use these coordinates for teleporting, we need to make just one change.  We need to subtract 28 from the Z coordinate.  This means that our new coordinates for our teleport pad are as follows: 1268 654 466

Why subtract 28?  Simply to put the pad on the ground.  If you use the same coordinates as directly reported by VIEWPOS, the pad will be floating in the air.

HELPFUL HINT Number 2 - Remember your basic algebra ... subtracting a number from a negative number makes the result MORE NEGATIVE. In other words, if your Z value from VIEWPOS is -500, the newly adjusted Z value will be -528, NOT -472. 

STEP 3 - Making our new ENT Data Entry

To make this work, simply replace the values in our teleport entry example, putting the new values in the "origin" data line.  That will make our entry for q2dm1 look like this:

{
"message" "Offworld transport to\nLOXophilia\n(72.5.249.99:27910)"
"wait" "3"
"sounds" "2"
"target" "q2@72.5.249.99:27910"
"origin" "1268 654 466"
"classname" "misc_offworld_teleporter"
}
 

Now all you need to do is add this text to the bottom of the ent file created by ENTDUMP in step one.  This, of course, will work on your local machine.  To make this work on a server, you will need to get the new q2dm1.ent file placed in the appropriate "entfiles" directory on your server.

HELPFUL HINT Number 3 - If you create your entity files on a Windows machine, but need to have them work on a Linux Q2 server, they will need to be converted to UNIX/Linux file format before they can be readily used by that server.  If you use FTP to transfer the files to the server, and use ASCII transfer mode, the files will convert automatically.  If not, you can use various programs such as "dos2unix" to convert them.  There are various conversion tools available on your Linux system for this as well.

Advanced Usage

What special things can you do to make best use of this feature?  The first thing, of course, is to simply use it.  In other words, try to create entity files containing at least one offworld teleport entity for each of the maps in your map rotation.

Another thing that you can do to highlight the fact that you are offworld-enabling your server and its map rotation is to update the description of your map to include the phrase "offworld enbabled", so users will see this at connect time.  To do this, simply update the string in the first entity of your map file.  For example, here is the first entity in the q2dm1.ent file:

{
"sounds" "7"
"classname" "worldspawn"
"message" "The Edge"
"nextmap" "q2dm2"
}

To let folks know you have adjusted your config to allow for offworld teleport, simply change it to this:

{
"sounds" "7"
"classname" "worldspawn"
"message" "The Edge (offworld-enabled by AdminDude)"
"nextmap" "q2dm2"
}

Another way to make your entity updates "shine" is to combine the addition of offworld teleporters with the addition of other entities, especially weapons, health, etc. 

One other thing that you can do to foster better "networking" between game server admins is to provide offworld teleporter links to servers of other Q2 mods, other clans, or other service providers.  Drop an email or a message board notice to the admins of these other servers that your game servers are "offworld teleported linked" to theirs and that you and your friends will be "popping in from time to time".  Chances are they will welcome the extra visitors and perhaps even be interested in returning a visit to your hood.

Credit Where Due

Special thanks to QwazyWabbit for the current implementation of the offworld teleport feature.  Phlem (author of this guide) wrote a prototype version of it, but QwazyWabbit took it up to a usable level, adding the notice that appears in the user screen and making the pads rotate so they could readily be distinguished from regular teleport pads.  In other words, QW made this feature usable.