Are you sick of making just terrains, seeing islands, and the dreaded no effort attempt at making a slate map? Well then this thread is for you! I thought it would be time to finally make an easy step by step tutorial on making interior maps. The scope of this thread is to give off small details at a time to help you learn the basics to working with Torque Constructor. Please keep in mind that I do this as a hobby. I may describe things wrong or incorrectly. If that happens please correct me.
NOTE: I will not help anyone until they get the program installed on their PC.
Now that we are done with the scope lets move on to the requirements:
Table of Contents:
1 – What you will need
2 – Making a Cube
3 – Learning to Modify your cube ( Currently being worked on)
? – Saving your work to be added on Blockland ( Currently being worked on)
? – The Blockland Mission Editor and YOU! ( Currently being worked on)
More things will be added than this. Expect Daily to Weekly updates on this thread.
1 What you will need-
Torque Constructor -
http://www.garagegames.com/products/constructor (requires to to make an account at Garage Games website to download. THIS IS A FREE PRODUCT)
Above is the Constructors main layout after you have the program installed. Some things may look slightly different but do not worry and do not get intimidated by the grid system. Once you get the basics down, you will hardly fear it.
The basics of the grid system:
Top Left: Shows the perspective of looking down at an object
Top Right: Shows the 3D version of what is on the grid
Bottom Left: Shows the perspective of looking at the back of an object
Bottom Right: Shows the perspective of looking at the left of an object
(these can be changed to show other views but for now we will leave them as they are)
2 Making a Cube (Easy)
Look at the picture and click on the object that looks like a cube. Anything circled and arrowed at in red show where to click. Once clicked you will see some things change with your menus.
By clicking on the cube you have opened up the properties box. This allows you to change a lot of the aspects of the object that you are making. But because you are a beginner, you wont need to touch most of these things until later on when you have a better understanding. The things that will matter most to you are the four buttons near the top of the properties box. Those buttons are ACTIVATE, RESET, MAKE, and MAKE & CONT.
Activate [ALT-A]
This button will show you your object in the windows and allow you to continue to edit it.
Reset [ALT-R]
This button resets the selected object to its default parameters.
Make [Return or Q]
This button will allow you setup your object without seeing it and when clicked makes it visible and deselected the object for you.
Make & Cont [SHIFT-Return or SHIFT-Q]
This button acts like make but keeps the current selected object active.
Now back to making the cube! To make our first cube simply make a square on any of the screens with the exception of the top right. (I used the top left screen) Its just like making a square in paint. Once you have your basic cube you need to click Make & Count and then press ESC on your key board. Congratulations! You should now have a cube like the one seen here.
Now your cube may look a different color. We will want to change the color then. Look at the picture above and next to the 1 you will see our texture panel. We are going to want to change the texture by clicking in BROWSE.
For now we will not be adding out own textures but instead we will be using the default colors that the Constructor gives us. Open the drop down list and choose a color. Once you have one, click on MAKE & CONT. To add the color we will want to click on your cube and on the texture window where the 1 is you want to click APPLY. Your cube should now change color!
The number 2 that highlights the bottom shows that we can do more with textures. When BRUSHES is highlighted it will fill the whole object with texture you have selected. FACES allows you to select a side of your object and texture it. To select multiple sides at once with FACES, hold SHIFT down on your keyboard while you are selecting your sides.
Now that you have these things down, play around and experiment. But before you do that you will want to save your .map. Simply go to file SAVE AS and make a folder and save your map. In its current form, it can not be ported to Blockland and be used in game. We will come back to that later and discuss how to add a .dts to Blockland to be used.
3 – Learning to Modify your cube ( Currently being worked on, Please wait for thread update)
Q & A's
(Please ask me questions in the thread and I will add them here to the opening post)
Q: How Many Interior Maps Have You Made?
A: I have made two. Office and Semi Truck. Both of which have not been released to meet Blockland's current map standard for V10. I will be porting them and possibly updating them later. I also have another map on RTB right now called Spyglass. Spyglass was made for another game and I ported and modified it for use with Blockland. Because of that, I will not call it one of my own.
Q: Have You Always Used Torque Constructor?
A: No I used to use a program called GTK Radiant for mapping in Quake 3 games. While the program can be used to map with Blockland, you have to jump through too many hoops and is not piratical for a person just learning how to map.
