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Barneys have the attributes UseSentence and UnUseSentence which can be used to specify what they say when asked to follow/stop following the player. So setting UseSentence to !BA_MAD0 results in a barney that says "step off, buddy" when asked to follow. (He will still follow anyway, you need to override his AI with a scripted_sequence.)
If you want him to say nothing at all, you could create a new sentence in a custom sentences.txt that makes him "say" a .wav with only silence in it.
Note: avoid editing the sentences.txt in the ../Half-Life/valve/sound folder directly, as those are the sentences used in the main game. You'll need to distribute the custom sentences.txt with your content, in your_mod/sound if it's a mod, or valve_addon/sound if it's an addon pack.

Ah, so it was a bug after all! Maybe it's time I tried using the Updated SDK... I just found out about this issue, if the problem is related to that then Updated should have fixed it. I'll try to finish my map(s) first though.

EDIT: For the record, I revisited the c4a1 portal room, and there they are - I remember now that I did these sprites in game before, I even looked for them in the map source, and thought it was weird when I couldn't find them... And, as it turns out, the spot they appear in is the world origin, or next to it. The oddest thing is how this bug seems to not place the sprites exactly at the origin. In my map the plantlight sprite isn't there (probably at a random out-of-bounds location next to it instead), but random sparks do appear at the exact spot sometimes. Well, at least it's fixed in Updated.

Oh, another thing - see if there's a .pts file in your compile directory. Maybe Hammer did generate the pointfile, but didn't load it automatically. You can load it manually through the Map menu. I should mention I used the J.A.C.K. editor instead of Hammer. I don't think it makes a difference in this case, but still...

I think I found the culprit: Another thing: don't surround your map with a box, this will make it much more expensive to compile and run. The parts of the map outside the playable area are supposed to be culled by the compile process, and that won't happen if you put it in a box. The right way to solve leaks is to find them and fix them locally, so only put the sky brushes (or any sealing brushes, really) where they are needed.

You know that little glow sprite at the end of a xen light stalk? From what I gather, it's supposed to appear when you set its tranparency and color in a xen_plantlight's FX Amount and FX Color render attributes. So I did that, but the sprite didn't show up.
I looked into the map sources for the Xen chapters and couldn't find any difference between valve's plantlights and mine. Then I visited the stalks in-game and found something odd - most of the stalks have their sprites as expected but some do not. I made a test map to see what could cause the sprite to disappear (apart from setting FX amount to 0) but came up empty. Neither rotation nor distance from map origin seem to affect it. What am I missing? Is this a known bug?