Mapping Tips

[Marcem]

Alright, since there's a lack of good maps, or use of good techniques, I'm making this thread to teach you guys some cool things about mapping. 

Torque Constructor

Portals
These won't teleport you, so don't get excited.
Portals are brushes that are meant for doors and such, so when you look outside you don't need to see extra geometry to prevent lag, much like Blockland's brick system hiding brick faces that are completely covered.
How to:
Create a brush where you want the portal, fit the brush into the spot.  Now select it, and in the properties box, check portal, as shown below.  The brush will turn pink.



Note:
Make sure the room is closed, make sure there are no spots that you can see out of other than where you have a portal.

Pie Tool
The pie tool is a new tool in the latest version of Torque Constructor.  It's used to make tubes, banked turns, and some more.  It's found under the user section of the tools box.  Feel free to paly with the settings, here's what some of them do:

Segments - How many sections are in the pie.
Start - The first section of the pie, default 0.
End - The last section of the pie. 

Hollow Center - Makes a tube if checked.
Center Size X - How many units the center's size will be on the X axis.
Center Size Y - How many units the center's size will be on the Y axis.
Center Top Adjust - How many units high the center is.
Center Bottom Adjust - How many units high the bottom is.

Outside Slope - How high the pie gets, as in swirling up.
Inside Slope - I don't know right now. 

That's all for now, I'm just too damn lazy to do the rest right now, I'll do it soon.

[Ad Bot]

[Marcem]

Mission Editor

fxShapeReplicator
This tool is a great thing to use for trees.  It places objects randomly around an area.  As shown below:



Yes, that IS 50,000 hammer models.  Now here's the settings I used:



I will add more to this section as I think of good things, suggest some to me, too.

[Kalphiter]

I thought those were Blocko legs at first

[Marcem]

So much blood! 

[Wedge]

If you need sugestions: Fxfoliage replicator, custom percipitation, physical zones, putting player spawns in the simgroup so they actually work, changing terrain detail texture and the block size to fix broken waterblocks, how to proppedly set up a waterblock so it doesn't look like a piece of stuff (shore textures, sky reflections, sun reflection, shore gradients, depth effects, opacity, finding good textures, setting up lava, scaling, etc).

Pm me whatever you don't want to write and I'll write it.