VanishedOne

It might be worth fiddling with the spawnargs, which are possibly just D3 values carried over. If "velocity" "100 100 00" uses the world axis then it's 0 in global z. (Then "random_velocity" is turned on, which apparently semi-randomises the values in all three axes.) Also "gravity" "266" must be pulling them downwards. Yes, I agree it's good to have both. The flinder system seems to be intended for cases where the direction comes from an external impulse, and spawnargs only determine mass, friction, etc.

The def in the OP should still be current. There's a test map to go with it here. One detail: idDebris is intended to have a 'fuse' like a grenade and be removed from the game world when it runs out (optionally with particle effects, and there seems to be shaderparm support for 'burnaway' effects like D3's dead monsters' too). Whereas flinders like those used by the wine bottles are standard moveables, so they persist and can be grabbed. While getting the links to my previous posts I found this one too, which may be of interest re. mappers' control of collision effects.

Have you looked at idDebris, like I mentioned on the tracker? The powder keg (not your urn, the w.i.p. idExplodingBarrel keg) spawns some as def_debris. Edit: however, just spawning one from the console doesn't 'launch' it. I just had a look for a way to do that at will, and didn't find one. (Edit2: by the way, my suggestion for creating 'the illusion of an explosion' would be the FX system: you can tie together sound, lights and particles, and there's even a 'launch' command that's supposed to launch projectiles, though it was unused in D3 and I haven't tested it. Maybe launching debris could be added to that.) https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Breakable_objects#Todo claims that wine bottles break under force, but I've been throwing one around and it didn't break even after I added "max_stress" and "max_torque" spawnargs.

Perhaps whoever wrote 'NOTE THIS MAY BE REPLACED BY inv_id to avoid translation conflict' intended it to mean 'It is possible that this will be replaced...' rather than 'You may replace...'

Right; the problem turned out to be how to implement it in this engine: https://bugs.thedarkmod.com/view.php?id=3135#c11735

There's a small amount of documentation about ET:QW's occlusion handling at https://wiki.splashdamage.com/index.php/Occlusion_Tests Yes, the ET:QW/Q4/Prey SDKs are quite a tease. If we had the full source we could find out how Q4 and ET:QW implemented material maps, for example. (Although the biggest tease is D3's own expansion, since TDM seems to have been built on vanilla gamecode: I hope to see the missing parts of xrayRenderMap ported someday, but after seeing all the changes RoE made to support slow motion I'm not holding my breath for an Arrow Time potion.)

SteveL was investigating occluders, though I think they were only intended to supplement the visportal system. (The native id Tech 4 approach to open terrain is of course megatextures, but you know what the catches are with those...)

Flinders' spawning with no velocity is an old bug. My comment from #4230: 'A bit of playing with breakables suggests that a single flinder spawns on the ground, 2+ flinders created with flinder_count (as opposed to two separate def_flinders, which can be given unique offsets as seen on the bottles) hover where they spawn.' As I say here, it's a bit unclear how the flinder system is supposed to be used, since the example on the wiki actually has "def_flinder" pointing to models, not entity defs. Apparently breakability in TDM is a bit of an old unfinished project: note the w.i.p. warnings on https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Breakable_objects

According to this, the reason TDM mines don't have fire stims is that they're intended to be non-incendiary kinetic explosives: So where does this leave powder kegs: incendiary or non-incendiary? I've been trying to research gunpowder blasts, but while there are loads of sites explaining deflagration versus detonation, trying to find out about e.g. the possibility of secondary ignition caused by sparks from a powder blast has probably just got me on government watch lists. I did find a couple of assertions about fires arising from explosions: So I'm not certain black powder is non-incendiary (if you want an explanation for non-incendiary mines, maybe they use some form of high explosive). Anyway, powder kegs: with the current set-up they have a 'burn' phase prior to the actual explosion, perhaps implying the wooden keg has caught fire first, and hence that they chuck embers (def_debris) around as well. Do we want them setting flammable things on fire?

I remember being surprised when I noticed in DR's AI tab that lanternbots weren't KO-immune, but thinking it made some sense given the spindly look that they'd have some delicate external machinery that could be disabled with a precise whack. I'm not familiar with the workings of the soundprop defs, but at a glance the relevant ones seem to be sprgs_blackjack_hit_hard ("alert_factor" "0.55", "vol" "40") and sprgs_sword_hit_hard ("vol" "48"). So my guess is that as things stand the sword is noisier.

I've seen it said of the current core asset base that it tends towards the clean and unscuffed. Admittedly that was five years ago, prior to Springheel's outdoor modules with all the grime decals included.

Welcome to the 'people who've tried writing Pagan lines' club. :-P If this AI is meant to be 'poorly educated and rural', as quoted, then I like the animal/venery motifs, but I don't think he comes across as poorly educated. Bits like 'I do not fear your cowardly barbs' sound to me as though they're coming from someone who's trying to play the role of a heroic warrior out of literature, rather than someone who's authentically down-to-earth. 'Educated class pagan sympathiser' is a viable role of course, even one I find interesting, but a bit of a niche I'd have thought. Maybe not those exactly ('dark lady' makes me think of Shakespeare's sonnets), but I much prefer that approach to the number of times 'spirits' appear in the OP. The trouble with that kind of generic animism is that the stereotypes it fits are so broad, it can bring e.g. a North American Fallout 2 character to mind.

That reminds me of this problem: being able to frob e.g. light switches in the next room through the wall unless prevented by mapper precautions. Presumably the default frob trace behaviour is too firmly established to change, but I wonder whether entities could be given a spawnarg that disables frobbing them through solids.

Quake 4 assets reference 'meat hooks' that appear to involve binding a ragdoll to an animated entity, but I'm not certain of the workings, especially a line in the ragdoll's script that uses bindConstraint.

Necro'ing because I think I've got somewhere with this: The way the noose looks isn't ideal: I had to scale it in DR in the first place, since the original obviously wasn't designed to go with the AI necks, and before I set the noose nonsolid the ragdoll would twitch around for a bit and then settle without a nicely drooping look. So you might want to continue using Sotha's anim (especially if you want a swinging-in-wind effect like in PD2, which this method won't allow). If you'd like a hanged ragdoll, though, this seems viable. Basically you take the modified AF below, save it as af/guard_base_newskel_hanged.af, and give the ragdoll an "articulatedFigure" "guard_base_newskel_hanged" spawnarg. This causes the head to be bound to the world, so it stays in position, but the rest of the body still has ragdoll physics (I also made it solid to the player).