What are some little-known commands for cheating?

[invictius]

Obviously excluding things like god, noclip, etc which should be common knowledge by anyone that's played for a while. I mean things like am_showkeys. I also requested a command that would trigger all linedefs at once but somebody explained that would often not make the way to the exit any more straightforward (though it's in crispy doom and fun to play with).

[Rachael]

Behold - many custom cheat codes with the "special" ccmd.

Code: Select all

alias exitlevel "special 243"
alias exitsecret "special 244"
alias noisealert "special 173"
alias changeskill "special 179 %1"
alias freezeme "special 191 0 1 4"
alias teleport "special 70 %1 %2"

(freezeme is meant to be used with thaw)

Some of those are more useful for mapping, but also for debugging maps when they break.

[Reactor]

I've meet "impulse 101" as a way to grab all weapons & ammo. I haven't the slightest idea, why this became universal.

[Rachael]

Half-Life popularized it. "Impulse" is a Quake-engine cheat that told the game DLL to perform some sort of debug action - and it only accepted integers. "101" was what Half-Life used to enumerate the items list to give the player one single of everything available.

[Reactor]

Oh...didn't know that. I thought it has some Easter Egg-ish meaning behind, but apparently, it has technical reasons. Thanks for enlightening me

[leileilol]

Half-Life popularized it. "Impulse" is a Quake-engine cheat that told the game DLL to perform some sort of debug action - and it only accepted integers.

In Quake it's really just a client-side cvar that communicated with the game code. It wasn't exclusively for cheating. All the weapon selection binds were impulses. "Impulse" only really stuck around in Half-Life because Valve were lazy to replace it with something else. Future Quakes didn't have impulse at all.

[Rachael]

Yeah, Leileilol actually made a full on source port for Quake, so she definitely knows what she's talking about, there, a lot more than me.