Doors

Recently you may have seen me gloating about putting doors on the KotB maps. Its an easy thing to do, but I thought I would publish some of the stuff I have been doing to help anyone trying to do something similar for any sort of mod.

Firstly, to add a door, you have to know where it goes. So, as per normal, make sure ed.py is in your scr folder, then go to the place on your map where you want there to be a door. Open the console and type

from ed import * (then hit enter, this loads ed)

loc()

and write down the coordinates.

Next, power up ToEEWB. We are gonna create a new .mob, so hit 'new'.

Now, we need a door. There are 111 of the little buggers in ProtoEd, they're at the very beginning. Which one do we use? (Don't bother with 150, for memory I made that and its a stuff-up). We'll get to choosing the right door for u in a second, lets assume u r using 1.

Now, put in the location as u have found it.

You WILL need to fiddle the offsets to get it to fit an existing doorway in a new map: to nudge it a bit down-n-left, add 10 or so in x offset. Up-n-right, have -10 in x offset, down-n-right add 10 or 15 in y offset, up-n-left try -10 (see the Isometric Schematic View in the sector bit of ToEEWB to see how the x and y values work). As for z, 10 or 15 will bring the door straight vertically down (hows that for tautology!) while -10 or so while nudge it straight up.

U also need to fiddle the rotation. Lets plagiarise Agetian one more time:

5.5 - northwest
5.0 - west
4.0 - southwest
3.0 - south
2.5 - southeast
2.0 - east
1.5 - east (sometimes it looks better than 2.0)
1.0 - northeast
0.5 - northeast (sometimes it looks better than 1.0)

Note how it goes anti-clockwise. If your door is in a wall running Nw-Sw (so a door facing out from it is perpendicular, facing SE) and is not perfectly aligned when u put in 2.5, nudge this up in the necessary direction. Ie, if it needs to be a bit more east-facing, nudge it up to 2.7. If it has to be a bit southward, try 2.3. Its trial and error but not as bad as it sounds, for instance I found the necessary value for one of Screegs maps and suspect he uses a similar camera angle so now i have it, i can type it straight in every time :-D If you are making new maps, u might wanna keep that in mind.

When u have done with your .mob, you EMBED it (not 'save', if you click save it will warn u u r doing something stupid). Of course u can save to fiddle with later (easier than embedding and extracting). So make sure u have the relvant sector (or all sectors in that map) in the sector folder of ToEEWB. You don't have to open then save the sector or anything like that, it will embed your door right into the sector in the folder even if u have not opened it with ToEEWB first )and you shouldn't open it, cause if u hit save later u will write your opened, doorless sector OVER the embedded sector and your door will disappear).

How to tinker the door later after embedding?

- open the sector
- go to static objects
- select the door and hit extract
- read what it says about having just made a .mob
- go back to objects and open the .mob created
- fiddle the .mob
- embed it
- go back to sectors and load the sector again
- now it has the new door embeded, delete the old one, and hit save!
- copy your sector back into the game, clear the map cache and test it.

Ok thats all pretty straightforward, actually nothing new so far for seasoned modders. Now for Ted's new contribution.

I spawned a whole bucketload of doors on a couple maps and have numbered them with Photoshop so when u want to get a new door, or make a map that takes doors into account, u can have a look here. Note that to my knowledge doors CAN'T be resized with the '3d model scale' thing - I tried it once and the game crashed. Perhaps new doors can be made resized as protos in col 6 of ProtoEd, but for the moment ur stick with the doors in game as the size they r.

EDIT BY TED: Actually, it turns out you CAN resize with '3d model scale' - I was entering a floating point thing instead of a percentage, thats why it was crashing. So resize doors to your hearts content! :-)

Anyways, here are the pix of the first 40 doors. The couple fo sliding doors have arrows indicating direction of slide. Note some of them have been opened and thus look perpendicular to how they appear when first spawned. I have left a few PCs here and there for scale, but to get them in your game and see if they suit the decor, just put your PC where u want the door and in the console, enter 'create ##' and see how it looks. Of course, the rotation will be off ;-)

You'll get the hang of it. Enjoy! 8^D



Hmmm... seems u have to click on the little buggers to get em to a decent size. Well, click dagnabit!