(L4D2 / Swamp Fever / Plantation level)

A question - anyone have any advice /examples on how to make a spiral? Not a helix but a spiral as seen in SPoG's Q2 map (vertical spiral lift bars).

If I figure it out first then I'll post a .map. 

it's not quite SPoG standard but here's a pic of an old speedmap i did years ago: http://isoterra.co.uk/images/qspiral.jpg

basically for that i started with a 12-sided hollow black cylinder (128 units high in that pic), which each 'side' split diagonally (i started with one brush, split it first, then vertexed & copied it round to form the cylinder, making sure the split always went the same way. i then cloned the whole thing and stacked another on top; then it was just a case of deleting half the brushes & a little more cloning upwards

if you can master that then it shouldn't be too hard to work out how to do different shapes & sizes. there is also a much messier way of doing it by fusing 6 4-sided shapes together to make a cuboid and then vertexing the resulting cluster any way you want, but qbsp tends to get upset at large amounts of those! 

dont bite the hand that feeds you (my map)

Find it on the quaddicted.com website, in the singleplayer maps section, type Ricky in the search field. thehand.bsp

The very first corridor you come to the cieling is 1/4 spiral. Infact Slave To a Machine has a spiral in the generator room.

So two maps I made with a spiral. If you look at the maps I jave the .rmf and the .map source availaible if you like. Just email me or message me here and I will send you the sources 

rj:

nice spiral. also as or the 6/4 side cuboid technique - better just make one cuboid into two triangular prisms, then you cant go wrong ;) 

4 sided shapes but got the offset wrong - will give the stack method a try - sounds alot easier tbh. 

It was the cylinder as an offset reference I was missing.

Problem was I didn't want to make an actual spiral but more something like a drill or screw.

Might well have a go at something a bit more ambitious with this. 

A drill might be tricky to do, assuming it's not the size of a room, because the smaller you get, the more difficult (or impossible) the technique becomes. 

rj:

nice spiral. also as or the 6/4 side cuboid technique - better just make one cuboid into two triangular prisms, then you cant go wrong ;)

oh you can. i have done anyway ;p

that's essentially what i ended up with above; it can just be a bit of a headache working out which way to split them sometimes; there are still several four-sided faces that need to keep intact

a full 'vertex block' (unofficial name i've given for the 6x4 brush thing) however can literally be bent anywhere on any axis, providing the result is at least concave. works great for natural terrain.. but probably isn't to be abused too much in minor architectural detail 

was actually in that speedmap pictured above; instead of leaving it as a pillar i tried to make it a full-blown arch with the spiral curving around. i got my head in a mess at the time & ditched the idea but on hindsight it should be easy if you build the curve before subtracting the negative brushes. might try it... i was actually wanting to do a big spirally setpiece as a finale for e2 :) 

That speedmap was one of the first maps I ever played (ran pretty slow...); that and Daz' graffiti maps are some of my favorite ("mapping-wankery-")speedmaps ever. 

Is the size of a room and not supposed to be used for drilling. The limitation of the grid is 2x2 so making a drill of 128 size I wouldn't even attempt - straight to .mdl.

Rj, the spiral made in the way you describe (assuming I'm not missing a step) comes back as invalid solid unless trisouped, though I haven't compiled to check it yet.

I still think back to SPoG - that map was insane for geometric complexity.

Hm, might try to coax AguirRe back to Quake 1 to see what made formations can be tweaked to compile better.

24 sided curved spiral anyone? 

upload a .map of your attempt so i can see if you went wrong anywhere? 

i just opened up the rmf of that map and noticed that wasn't how i did it. each side was actually split into 4 not 2. i'll just upload the thing so you can have a look and pull it apart :) 

http://isoterra.co.uk/stuff/timegate.map
http://isoterra.co.uk/stuff/sm48_xen.wad

just attempting a 24-sider now :D 

Sprials.rmf in the testmaps folder, or there's examples of 24 sided shapes from ctf1rq - with some geodesic domes in there as well. 

The 24 sided stuff is pretty limited.

...I remember I did include some helix' as well though - above the stairs off to the sides in the courtyard. 

i just put up a 24 sider in the same folder. it only goes down to the 4 grid at that size so you could in theory either half the bar widths or go for a full-blown 48 sider if you wanted to show off. you could probably get away with half the bars though at 24/48, i don't think spog's had that many 

Will take a butchers later though, got people starting to arrive. 

Okay - so trying to do something with this not quite speedmap and wondering

how can I go about spawning a key in a map?

I'm working in Quoth, of course. 

I was going to post a hacky way of doing it, but I'll hold my tongue. There's a correct way of doing it, which is to use the info_multispawn with a spawncount of 1, and set the spawnclassname and spawnfunction to item_key1 instead of a monster class.

A full write-up of the info_multispawn entity can be found here: http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=60173&start=257&end=257 

 

Hello again,

I have made a Func_train that goes round, it has 4 path_corners. What I want to do, if possible, is to make a door that opens up to let the train go true. The problem is, I don't know how to do that. Any ideas ? 

At the correct time. Make a trigger_relay entity with the same targetname as the train. When the train gets triggered it will trigger the trigger_relay too. And you make the trigger_relay target the door, but give the trigger_relay a "delay" key with a value of "X", X being the amount of seconds before the door is to open.

Is it "delay" or "wait"? One or the other :) 

Yes, that's right. Though it sounds like the door is supposed to open not only once but every time the train passes it. In this case you have to add a second relay with the same targetname that fires the first relay again after the right delay, so the cycle starts over again. 

Is it possible to make a path_corner trigger the relay or even the door directly?