AAATRIGGER Last edited 8 months ago2024-03-01 00:25:03 UTC

AAATRIGGER is a small but easy-to-recognise tool texture used by mappers to help identify trigger brush entities in their editing. It should not be used on regular world brushes, as it causes problems like game crashes sometimes; so it must be on an entity like a trigger that is invisible in game.

Use the AAATRIGGER brush to identify your invisible triggers, like trigger_teleport, trigger_once and trigger_multiple. If you use it on a func_button then the texture will be rendered, and as said above, that might cause problems.

Newer compilers like VHLT strips away face information on faces that use AAATRIGGER so it won't be visible under any circumstances, making it visually similar to NULL. This does eliminate the crashing problem as a side-effect. Even with older compilers, using AAATRIGGER as intended is highly recommended over normal textures as the compilers usually tag AAATRIGGER-textured faces as special, and these don't consume any AllocBlock resources.

Trivia

• There is an older version of AAATRIGGER, being a low-res crop of Gabe Newell's face, found embedded in some of Half-Life's BSPs and in xeno.wad. This mention is to clarify folk myths about the nature of the "gaben face" textures in some parts of Half-Life in so-called "monster boxes".
  • Specifically, monster boxes were an old Quake technique to spawn monsters into the level later via teleport, either because monstermaker hasn't been added into the game at that point in the map's development, or to bind TriggerTargets to specific monsters, which can't be done to monstermaker or its children.