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:

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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