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 Advanced Doors

By: Verxion

Verzion

Dated: 22/6/98 

Download: Download Map - 1008K

Click here for a printable version of this Tutorial.

FORWORD:


This is the fourth tutorial I have written, it is starting to feel like I know what I am doing. :-) 


ABSTRACT:


This tutorial goes over doors. Not just simple doors. DOORS. Complicated doors with bells and whistles. We don't start there though. We make a simple door, and then adjust it over and over to make it more and more impressive. To give you an idea of what I am covering, I will start with a simple door that opens in one piece when you approach, and ends up with a door that has sound effects and moving parts. You can basically follow the tutorial until doors of the level you want are covered. :-) 


ASSUMPTIONS:


This is an advanced tutorial. I assume you know quite a bit about the editor to be able to finish the tutorial. I will try to make the first stage or two of the tutorial easy enough that if you are new to the editor you should come away being able to make at least simple doors. But to finish the whole tutorial, you will need to know your way around the editor fairly well. 


TUTORIAL:



PHASE ONE:


First off, make a room at least 512x512x512, and place some textures onto it. 


caption: here, you see the initial room. 

Next, we need to make a wall across the room, such that we seperate the room into 2 rooms. Once we have made the wall, cut a rectangular hole in it such that it looks like a doorway. 


caption: here, you see the wall seperating the rooms, and the adjoining doorway. 

Now, in my case, I have made the depth of the doorwar especially thick to make the construction of the more complicated types of doors easier to see. If you are just making a simple door, you would want to make the wall and hence the doorway of a fairly small thickness. 

Next, you need to make a door. Since this door will be a "mover", we will build it up in the air, texture it, intersect it, copy the poly's to the brush, and place the mover. Was that a lot of steps? Well, the first time through, we will show all the steps, don't worry. 


caption: this is the door, suspended in mid air. 

Now, you need to intersect the door. You do this by making your builder brush larger than the door itself, WITHOUT scaling. If you scale it, your door will end up being hollow, and you will be able to walk through it. Right click on the block symbol in the toolbar and adjust the height, width, and breadth under "cube properties". 


caption: This is the door, surrounded by the builder brush. 

Now, intersect the door. Next, right click on your builder brush, and choose "copy polygons -> to brush". Now, move your builder brush to where the door should be when it is "shut". Once it is there, go ahead and delete the door suspended in mid air (or, if you think you may have done something wrong, go ahead and leave it there for a while until you are sure the mover is working). 

Now, click on the "add movable brush" icon in the toolbar (the cube with the swirls coming out of it). 


caption: This is the mover, placed in the doorway. 

Next, we are going to make a place for the mover to move to above its position. Grab your builder brush, and put it just above the mover, but aligned to the mover in all other dimensions. Choose a texture for this slot, and subtract. 


caption: Here you can see the mover with the builder above it. 

Now, right click on the mover, and select "Mover Keyframe -> Key 1". Now, slide the mover straight up into the slot we made for it. Ok, next we need to put it back on keyframe 0, so select the mover, right click on it, and select "Mover Keyframe -> Key 0". Guess what? You are ready to try this door out. Hit F8, rebuild, and then hit ctrl-p to try the level out. The door should go up in the air when you bump into it. Give it a try. 


PHASE TWO:


Well, we made a door. We made it move. Is that an advanced door tutorial? I don't think so. Notice that the door we made only moved when we bumped into it. And further, it made no sounds at all. Although personally, I like doors to work when you bump into them (I think it is more realistic), the doors in the single player game don't work like that. And I shouldn't be restricting you to something, should I? :-) Another good point would be that for a door to move up vertically, we probably aren't LIFTING it, so it would make sense for it to move by itself, and if it moves by itself, then we shouldn't HAVE to bump into it. 

Ok, enough rambling. What we are going to do now is gradually adjust our door bit by bit. I will name each new modification to the door a "PHASE" so you can clearly see when we are about to do something new to the door, and have finished a modification. Our first modification is a very very simple one. Lets add some SOUND! :-) 

Right click on your mover, and choose "Mover Properties". Take a look at the section called "Mover Sounds". For right now, we will just mess with the "ClosedSound" and the "OpeningSound". I think once you see these, you will understand the process. You will probably want to do something for "MoveAmbientSound" occasionally. Select "ClosedSound", and click on the three dots to the right of it. You will notice that "SoundFX" is selected on the far right toolbar in the editor. Click on the "Load" button over there, and choose "DoorsAnc". For ClosedSound, lets choose "adend53", then in our properties dialog, click the button marked "use". You will see the sound listed there. Now, do the same thing for "OpeningSound", except choose the sound "adend52". Close your mover properties window, do an F8, rebuild, and ctrl-p the level. Now, when the door moves you should hear sounds. :-) 


caption: Here, you see the filled out "Mover Properties" dialog, complete with an ambient move sound. 


PHASE THREE:


Didn't that seem more realistic? Sounds add so much to the realism of a level in my opinion. Ok, next, lets make it so you don't have to bump into the door to open it. What we will do is make a trigger that opens the door when we walk near it. 

First thing we will do is name our mover. Why do we need to name it? Well, triggers affect specific objects (these objects all have the same tag), and if the objects don't have a unique tag name, the trigger won't have anything to act upon. So, right click on your mover, and choose "Mover Properties". Next, choose "Events", and you should see a section marked "Tag". Change it to say "door1". Now we have a unique tag name to use for our trigger. But since we are already in our Mover Properties section, lets change one other aspect of our mover. If you remember, bumping into the mover caused it to move. What we want now is for the trigger to cause the mover to move. So we have to change how the mover acts. Open the section called "Object", and click on the section marked "InitialState". You will see it is currently marked "BumpOpenTimed", well, that pretty well describes how it works right now. Choose the drop down arrow next to it and change the value to "TriggerOpenTimed". Ok, now our mover is all setup to be triggered. 


caption: These are the relevant sections of the mover properties with the new values for being triggered. 

Ok, so it should make sense to you that we need a trigger, right? :-) Lets add one. Go to the Classes section on the "Browse" drop down menu. This is on the right hand side of your editor screen if you didn't know. :-) You will notice an item at the bottom called, interestingly enough "Triggers". Well, expand this section, and expand the section inside called "Trigger". Quite a few options eh? We aren't going into them all now. We just need a simple trigger. 

Choose "Trigger", and place it on your map. I have said before that I prefer to add items in the XZ or YZ views (the two views on the right of the editor by default). The reason I prefer to do this is that you place the item at the correct Z height, and only have to move it to the correct XY position, easily done on the overhead map. And on simple maps like this, it normally picks the right XY position for you. :-) 

Put your trigger on the floor, right in front of the door, perhaps 5 feet or so in front of it, in the middle of the doors' width. Ok, now we need to modify the trigger properties. Go ahead and right click on the trigger, choose "Trigger Properties", and then choose "Events". Now, change the "Event" from none to "door1". This will cause the door to be acted upon by the trigger. Just fyi, under "Trigger", you will find an item called "TriggerType", and this has some interesting different ways of triggering the trigger. But the default value is fine for us. 

Ok, do an F8, rebuild, and ctrl-p. When you get into the level, be sure to walk in a straight line for the door. By default, the trigger area is pretty small. Keep moving around until you find it. (If you placed it right in front of the door like I described, it shouldn't take but a second to find it). 

You will notice that if you move through the doorway into the other room that you will not be able to go through the door. You have a "one way door" right now because there is no trigger on the other side. As an exercise, you might want to add another trigger in the other room and make sure you can get through the doorway from either side. Just follow the same directions for the other room. 

You will also notice that there is a red line drawn from the trigger to the door. The red lines on maps allow you to easily see the "cause and effect" of your triggers, ie, what area has the trigger, and what the trigger is effecting. Do not forget this, because when your maps get very complicated, without the lines, it would be very easy to get lost. 

One last item for this phase. If you wanted to, you could increase the area of effect of the trigger by increasing the "CollisionRadius". This is located in "Mover Properties" under "Collision -> CollisionRadius". This will allow you to be in a less specific area. You can even increase the radius fairly high, and place the trigger right under the door, then you can approach the door from either side, and activate it with only one trigger. 


PHASE FOUR:


Man oh MAN is this a long tutorial or what? :-) And I am not even getting paid for this. What was I thinking? Oh well, hopefully people will benefit from this. Next, lets make a panel on the wall next to the door that causes the door to open. We will be using the trigger to cause this to happen. 

If you increased the CollisionRadius in the previous phase, reduce it back down to something like 150. If not, go ahead and leave it where it is. 

Now, take your builder brush, and create a rectangular panel looking shape, that isn't too deep. Choose some appropriate seeming texture, and place the builder brush to the left or right of the door, at a height that your character can walk up to. Next, move your trigger to be right in front of the panel, and in the middle. 


caption: I made mine as a small button type panel near the floor to the left of the door. 

Now, if you positioned your trigger in the right spot, all you should have to do is F8, rebuild, and ctrl-p to try it out. If you bump into the panel, the door should open. You can probably remember some spots like this from in the single player game. 

Again, unless you put a trigger on the other side of the door, this will be a one way door. Remember, you can simply duplicate this little panel and put it on the other side of the wall with a corresponding trigger to be able to open it from either side. 


PHASE FIVE:


Yup, still here, still adding stuff to this door. :-) Well, we are gonna get a bit fancy now. Let's make a mover out of our panel. We will make it move when we push it. Add some sound to it, and it will seem that much more real! Ok, surround your panel with a non scaled brush ( refer to the first mover we made if you forgot how to do this), and intersect it. Subtract from the wall a spot large enough for the panel to slip into, then move the brush back to the panel. Then, copy the polygons to the brush, move the brush out of the way, and delete the original panel. 

Now, move the brush to where it is just at the edge of the hole in the wall that you made. Add special, and voila, we have our mover. Move the brush out of the way. Now, right click on the mover, select the second keyframe (keyframe 1), and move the mover into the hole in the wall. Now, right click on the mover again, and put it back at keyframe 0. Add some sound if you want (You might use adend50 for the switch opening sound). Make sure your trigger is right on top of the switch. Do an F8, rebuild, and ctrl-p to play it. 

Now, when you walk up to the switch, the switch should move into the wall (and make a sound if you did that), and simultaneously, the door should open up. Pretty decent eh? 


PHASE SIX:


Well, I don't know why I keep going on this, but I am. :-) We are going to make one final modification to this whole thing. We will make the door open as two pieces, and have the two pieces open to each side. What we will do first is delete the subtracted region above the door (since it won't be going up anymore), and removing the mover for the door itself. But leave the switch and the trigger there, we will be needing them. 

After you have removed those items, lets build the new door. We will do this by making the same shape for the new door, again, up in the air. Next, we will subtract a small section from the middle of the door. This should be a narrow slice down the center of the door vertically. 


caption: Here, you can see the door, complete with a vertical slice down the center. 

You need to intersect the two halves and place the movers. To do this, select your brush, reset the scaling again (if you forgot how to do any of these steps look at the previous phases in this tutorial), and enclose the right half of the door with the brush. Make certain that only the right half of the door is enclosed, no part of anything else being in the enclosure. Now, intersect the door half. 

Now, move the builer brush to a position in the door frame such that if the right half of the door was to slide fully to the right, it would have someplace to slide into. Make certain it is in the correct position in all dimensions. Once you are certain of this, make certain that if you were to subtract the brush, that it would create a visible hole in the side of the door frame. What I mean by this is that if your brush is too far into the wall, you would subtract it away, and see no visible difference (of course, if that ends up happening, you can just hit undo and try again). Once you think it is all lined up correctly, subtract it away from the doorframe. You should see a spot for your door piece to slide into now. 

Next put your brush so it is exactly on top of the right half of your door again. (This should be where the brush was when you intersected it before). Now, right click on the brush and do the "Copy polygons -> to brush". You are ready to place the mover for the right half of the door. Put the builder brush just to the left of the hole you cut out for the door half. In this position, the door should cover half of the doorway. Make certain it is aligned in every dimension, and when you are certain of this, click on the "add mover" icon (the block with the swirls coming out of it). 

You have done half of the door. Repeat the above procedure exactly for the left half of the door. When you have finished the process, delete the door and the subtraction down the middle of the door from the middle of the room (this is the door that you intersected that I am asking you to delete). 


caption: Here, you can see the two movers in place, ready to be told how to move. 

We are nearly done! Select the right hand door mover, then hold the control key down and select the left hand door mover. You should now have them both selected. Next, right click on one of them, choose "Mover Properties", and we will modify a few settings. These will be the same as before. Under "events", change the "Tag" to be "door1", and under "Object" and change the "InitialState" to be "TriggerOpenTimed". You should now see a red line on your 2d views that goes from your trigger to your door mover pieces. If you don't, something went wrong, go through the procedure and try to find what it is. 

Next, and this is VERY critical, unselect your movers, and select ONLY the right hand mover. You do not want them both selected for this part. Right click on the mover, and select "Mover Keyframe -> Key 1". Now, move the mover so that it is in the recessed portion of the wall, in the hole that we made for it. If you want, you could leave a little bit of it still sticking out into the doorframe area. When it is in the position you wanted, right click on it again, and select "Mover Keyframe -> Key 0". Next, do the same thing for the left piece of the door, putting it into the hole on the left. 

If you want, you can add sounds to the door pieces like we did before. As I mentioned earlier, I think the sounds add a lot to the feel of a level. 

Guess what? You are ready to try this thing out! F8, rebuild, and ctrl-p the level to see how it works. You should be able to hit the switch on the wall and see the two pieces of the door move into their respective chambers, making room for you to walk through the doorway. As before, if you want to open the door from the other side, you will need a trigger on that side for it to happen, but I think you are advanced enough now to know how to do that! :-) 

Take this tutorial, go through it a couple of times until it seems clear to you what the steps are. Then, design some doors on your own that make use of the principles I have shown you. 

One last thing. I will be adding to this tutorial later on to give you a door that has moving gear pieces in a VERY elaborate technique such that you can see the actual mechanism that opens the door. This tutorial was long enough and SOOOOO many people were emailing me that they wanted it, that I have decided to release it now. I will add to the tutorial later on. 

Good luck, and may all of your levels be awesome! :-) 

-Joe Chott (AKA Verxion)  
  
   
 

 

 
  
 
  
 
 







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