How do you make beams or lasers work in MSC?

[Regorty]

As the title says, I can not figure out why my attempt at making beams in msc maps don't seem to work, even though I followed the tutorial on TWHL.

 

[Thothie]

Maybe a source and description of the exact issue?

It should be fairly simple, an env_beam with the "start entity" (LightningStart) defined as itself, and an "end entity" (LightningEnd) set to a specific info_target should create a beam between the two entities when the env_beam is triggered.

Beware that I think the default color for beams is 0 0 0 in the current Half-Life.fgd, and that may end you up with an invisible beam.

Beware, also, env_beam's are server side, and thus extremely resource intensive - damage done by beams may also lead to an "unclean" glitchy death.

 

[Regorty]

Maybe a source and description of the exact issue?

It should be fairly simple, an env_beam with the "start entity" (LightningStart) defined as itself, and an "end entity" (LightningEnd) set to a specific info_target should create a beam between the two entities when the env_beam is triggered.

Beware that I think the default color for beams is 0 0 0 in the current Half-Life.fgd, and that may end you up with an invisible beam.

Beware, also, env_beam's are server side, and thus extremely resource intensive - damage done by beams may also lead to an "unclean" glitchy death.

I don't think I have an info_target entity. Also the tutorial I used was:
http://twhl.info/tutorial.php?id=12
It includes a rmf to use as a reference. I tried taking the beam effects out of the file and placing it into my map and triggering it, but nothing happens.

I mostly plan to use the beam effects as temporary visuals that are only active for a couple seconds, just to add that little extra immersion.

 

[Thothie]

...well, simply copy-pasting a tutorial isn't the best way to go about learning from it. :?

The tutorial runs fine, however, so it seems you musta missed something while you were cheating on your exams.

In this case, the beams are following a func_train instead of an info_target, which makes the tutorial a bit more complicated - it maybe you only copied the beams and not their targets (the train itself is a brush entity, so maybe you just copied the point entities).

On a side note, it should also be possible to get a beam to follow a monster, if it has a targetname. (Also it seems MiB fixed that glitchy death thing I warned of awhile ago.)