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PART 2 - EXPANDING YOUR MAP

In the previous tutorial I explained how you can make a room, texture and light it.  In this the  second part of the tutorial I will explain how you can join rooms together.  The fact that two separate rooms can be joined will probably form the basis of all the maps you will make.

A 'PROPER' MAP

Already in the first tutorial you have made a room which you can walk about in, admire the coloured lighting Kingpin can produce and take a look at some of the different textures.  However you would have to agree that a simple room isn't a 'proper' map.  A proper map should have at least a few different rooms, or if not rooms, areas the player can explore.  Usually with doors dividing areas and lifts or platforms to arrive at the higher parts of the map.   Perhaps even a ladder or two.  This tutorial will deal with linking rooms.   Once we have some linked rooms, I will go on to explain doors, platforms and ladders in the next tutorial.

To begin start up QERadient ready to make the new map.  Now you will need to produce two separate rooms.  Make the rooms both about 256x256x128 in size.  The player is about 80 units high, so you should always make your rooms higher than 80 inless of course you want the player to have to crawl.  Position the rooms next to each other but with about 30 units separating them (this doesn't have to be exact).  To make sure that both rooms are at the same height as each other you can change the view that is shown in the main screen of QERadient.  You can do this by pressing CTR-TAB or by pressing the button on the toolbar labelled 'xyz'.  The view being shown in the main window is shown by a little bit of text in the top left corner of the main window.  By default the view is top.   The text should say XY-Top to represent this. 

Although with simple maps it can be easy to keep track of the different views, and how they relate to your map, just the simple fact that it tells you what view you are using in the main window can help to prevent disorientation as your map gets bigger.  Add more and more rooms and you will start to think 'Huh?  what's that room over there...'.  Unfortunately this is a disadvantage of QERadient that the views can be a little confusing, but if you learn to use the different view points properly it should all become clear.

Anyway back to the map.  Hollow out the two rooms as before and give them some nice textures.  You can use the different views to select the individual brushes which now make up the floors, walls and ceilings to give them individual textures.  There is another way of selecting brushes but I'll come onto that a bit later (Its only really useful when things get much bigger).  Add some lighting to both rooms as before, and add an info_player_start.

Your map so far should look something like this:

image1small.jpg (25454 bytes)

Now, where you want to allow the player to move between the two different rooms you have to make a brush which is one unit wider than you want to corridor on each side, and one unit higher than you want the corridor on both bottom and top.  Remember though to make it so that that one unit goes below the floor (the bottom of the brush would then be at the same height as the bottom of the room). 

Now draw another brush the size you want to corridor to be.  Make sure that not any part of this brush goes outside of the first bigger brush that you made, or else your map will leak!

Your map should now look something like this:

image2.jpg (82888 bytes)

Now with the brush which you made which intersects the first brush you made at the point you want the corridor to go you can make the corridor.   Don't worry that the second brush goes out into the rooms.  Select the brush which is in the space you want to corridor to go through and in the [selection] menu choose [csg] then CSG substract.  This will delete the second brush you made, but will also use that second brush as a template to 'vut through' the first brush you made between the two rooms'.  In the space where the second brush was there will now be a gap between the two rooms. 

You can do this with any two brushes.  If you want to make a hole in a wall, then the wall serves as the first brush.  Just make a second brush in the position you want the hole and use the substract tool.  One hole :)

The important thing to remember is that the brush which you use the substract tool on MUST NOT take away any brushes which will expose the map to the area 'outside' of what you have made.  This area out side is like the eternal void.  You must keep your map enclosed or else you will have a leak.  This is where light from your map 'leaks' out into this 'eternal void'.  Nice technical terms here, but I hope you get the idea.  If the map does leak a red line will be drawn in the editor showing where the leak is.

Quite often it's a good idea to save your map before you try any substraction, incase you accidentally take away part of the map and create a leak.  Just as long as you keep the brush you substract inside of another brush though you'll be ok.  This was the reason for creating the larger brush between the two rooms.

Try experimenting with linking any number of rooms by this method.  If you want you could even try creating a leak by substracting part of the floor and see what happens. The next part of the tutorial will deal with doors, platforms and ladders... look out for it soon!

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This page was last updated on Saturday, August 21, 1999 at 08:06PM EDT.