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Temporary Entities

wootguy edited this page Nov 29, 2025 · 2 revisions

Introduction

Temporary entities are like normal entities except that they automatically kill themselves, use less bandwidth, and don't crash the server if there are too many of them. All effects are visual only and don't deal any damage or interact with other entities. The effects are created using network messages (MESSAGE_BEGIN()), which lets you control who can see the effect.

Everything I know is from this post and my own testing. I probably made some mistakes, and I couldn't get all effects to work. Let me know of any inaccuracies or if you were able to get TE_LIGHTNING or TE_BSPDECAL to work. -w00tguy (circa 2016)

Contents

Beam Effects

Explosions & Simple Sprite Effects

Sprite-based Particle Effects

Quake-style Effects

Gibs & Other Model Effects

Tracer Effects

Decals

Miscellaneous:

TE_TEXTMESSAGE

Engine pallete #1

Engine pallete #2

  • used with TE_STREAK_SPLASH and TE_USERTRACER
  • Note: Indexes greater than 11 are undefined, so will get a random-ish color (unique per game version)

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