Trial and error is the only way to learn mapping.
It will take time. You simply have to do. One room leads to
another, a corridor, an outside area. the ability to build from scratch
is not taught. It comes from practice. You want to express yourself.
And this is your canvas.
Small, tight, smart. Think vertical as much as horizontal.
and try to make it original. This a repeat from the introduction page.
But it might make more sense now.
Build in small chunks, components and prefabs, and then
assemble it together as your project takes shape. Advantage? Small
incremental accomplishments. You make something, you see that it
functions properly, learn some stuff in the process, and then start the
next component. It never gets overwhelming. If you build that way,
you'll find that thinking through the creation of a level is easier.
You'll then know you need a couple rooms, a corridor, an atrium. That's
how the professionals do it, various team mappers build components and
then they're assembled and tested. And if something sucks, then its only
that component that sucks, its doesn't translate to the rest of the
level, so that chunk is shelved, and a new piece is created in its
place, compensating for whatever inadequacy was present. And you should
always put something down on paper. Mapping is akin to archtitecture, in
the real world you'd never build anything without blueprints. It's just
a starting point, they don't need to be adhered to, but they are a step
in the process. And to follow through on the analogy, building from the
ground up makes a lot of sense, cause it helps towards scale,
composition and space.
Start small, realistically, if this is your first map, try making a deathmatch for four players
All right, let's build upon what we have already learned. A corridor.
Let's go back to those two rooms we built in the previous
tutorial placed beside each other. Since they're each in a container,
let's go into the node tree and select "second room", and then drag it
in the floorplan view approx. 1024 units away. It should snap to the
grid if you are still at 64 gridsize. (I think staying on the grid is
very important)
We now want to put a nice corridor between these two rooms.
We have a few options:
- We can build it from scratch
- We can use the six room Brushes we already have to get us started or
- We could dig through one of the sample maps and borrow an official prefab
We're going to be dealing with prefabs in a later tutorial
so we'll leave that option for then. Building the corridor from scratch
makes sense if you're changing the look and feel of the corridor. But
since this corridor will be part of the same complex as the rooms, and
these rooms already have the right textures on the Brushes, we'll just
use what we already have, and save time.
With the "second room" still highlighted, copy and paste
alternate a third room, and go into the node tree and rename it
corridor1. Since we have a corresponding opening in both rooms, move the
corridor between them, and stretch/compress the floor and ceiling
brushes so they butt up to the two rooms, with a doorway at either end,
and then move the two wall Brushes, so they seal up the level. You
quickly notice you have two additional Brushes.
Again, we have a couple options:
- You can delete them, (but since they're
already textured and sized for your level, you are tossing away an
incremental amount of time. It's much better to use them.)
- You can resize them into pillars or
- You can split them in half and use them as columns
We're going to do both. Select the two additional Brushes, and group them. Under selection click group selection:
Immediately in the node tree, name the resulting container
Pillars, and then copy and paste alternate the pillars folder and name
it columns.
We're going to use the columns in the corridor, and we're going to use the pillars in the second room.
Select the column Brushes, and using Split, slice them in
half. If you can't remember how to split, check the earlier tutorial on Dedit Basics.
A good size for a side column is 32 x 64 so resize these in the topdown
view and move them against the wall opposite each other. Now we should
have four columns, two on each side of the corridor and butted to the
wall without overlapping. Columns look good 256 units apart from each
other. But this is a long corridor, so select the four Brushes and
copy/pastealternate four additional Brushes and place them in the
corridor 256 units apart.
That's a lot faster than building them from scratch. The
amount of time a map takes to create is in direct proportion to the
incremental savings in time with redundant tasks.
We still have those pillars. Placing a couple pillars in the
second room and resizing them to 64 x 64 in the top view should take
about a minute. Always remember good mapping happens in the details.
Make sure your Brushes do not overlap. Check this using all the views
available.
All said and done you now have an empty first room, and a
second room with pillars, and a 1024 long corridor with columns on the
side joining them. I just had a thought, ...
Mapping is a creative process, and usually inspiration will
hit you. I want to do something with that first room. Let's go into the
node tree and find the pillar folder. If we select one of the pillars,
it'll already be highlighted in the tree, select the pillar container,
copy/pasteALT (I think you're noticing I use this a lot, reason is it
keeps the Brushes on the grid) and in the node tree, name the new
container "Partitions", and then in the top floor view drag the selected
pillars into the first room. Now stretch out the two Brushes so they
make divide the large first room into smaller rooms. A T-shaped design
could work well. Make sure the wall doesn't intersect the
GameStartPoint. move the GSP if necessary.
We could do a process now but let's look at one other object that we only skimmed over before.
And if you want to mess with the aliens a bit, you can always set the flag on your brushes to NOWALLWALK=TRUE
WORLD PROPERTIES OBJECT
This is one of the truly powerful objects that is easily overlooked, but absolutely necessary, you can't create a level without it. We had included it in our initial level and placed it near the game start point.
You can set the theme of music that will play when The
Player makes contact with threats in the level and the general ambient
music score.
You can set the FarZ, which is the far clop plane, beyond
this distance the engine does not draw the level. This is a very
powerful setting. If you level has a lot of detail and some bad frame
rates you can lower the number to some thing between 2000-5000 ( Dedits
default number is 50000) it will cut down on the amount that needs to be
drawn. If you set this but don't make an adjustment with the FOG you
would see a solid wall of whatever color the void color is, in this case
black. To hide this, you couple a short farZ with distance fog:
This fog distance is always relative to the player position.
So the fog starts (thiness) 1 unit away from the player, and is 100%
OPAQUE (thickness) at 5000 units from the player. The important flag is
setting the FogEnable=TRUE (it's necessary for Vfog as well). Usually
you would not have the fog start at 1, but rather 256 or 512, cause it
makes the details in a room look rather dull. It should also be noted
that this fog happens througout a level, both inside and out.
A first relation to fog is VFog or VERTICAL FOG, similar
to what you see in DM RESERVOIR. It isn't placed in relation to the
player, but rather in relation to the level. The numbers for MinY and
MaxY are in direct corresponding Y values of your actual level.
If you set Vfog true regular fogEnable must be set True as
well. I have to thank Nerotrobe for these settings. If you play with the
colors and the settings you can get some pretty funky results.
One of the other things you can change with the properties
setting is the chrome effect that happens on all the weapons. You can
set a different file. This is more an advanced modding type thing, but
I figured I'd mention it.
Alright, let's do a process on this level of ours and Run
it. Check out your handy work. If you've added fog, you can play with
the numbers and experiment and re process. You'll find something you
like.
Here's a dowload of my version if you're interested. Firstcorridor.zip