(2/18/2002)

This project is starting to accumulate a number of custom files now; textures, sounds, a backgound, not to mention the map itself. Since I do want to distribute my map pack one day, I need to start thinking about how I'm going to package it. By far the best way seems to be to set it up as a custom game.

Custom games have a number of advantages. Everything can be packaged as in a single folder, which a user can install by simply copying the entire folder into their Halflife folder. The game can be easily launched then by choosing "custom game" on the Half-Life menu. You can have your own splash screen and logo. And finally you will trick people into thinking you know what you're doing.

It is not hard to turn a map pack into a custom game. There is an excellent tutorial over at the 69th Vlatitude that walks you through the basics, step by step. After getting the basics set up, I did a little "reverse engineering" of other people's custom games to see how they did certain things, such as adding the fancy splash page and custom logo.

Now it at least looks like I know what I'm doing. If only there were some real material behind this! Time to quit fooling around with the flashy stuff and do some nuts and bolts mapping.

My abandoned mine will feature a number of elevators - rickety, rusty contraptions that should make a player think twice before getting on. There are a number of ways to make a good elevator, but for these I chose the func_train entity. There are four major components; the shaft, the elevator car, the control buttons, and the path corners.

The elevator shaft needed to be done in some detail, because the elevator car will be largely open, and it will be visible. Essentially though, it's just a vertical variation on the tunnels I'd already created, so it went together quickly. I wanted to give the player a feeling of going deep under the earth, so this elevator shaft is over 100 feet long, with lots of heavy timber framework around it.

Next came building the elevator car itself. This should have been simple, but once again I had to get fancy. I decided that I wanted to give the sides a wire cage look, so I covered them with a rusty grate texture - a transparent texture. Now as I had when I used transparent textures before, I made the brush they were on into a func_wall, set the Render mode to "solid", and the FX amount to 255 - just like you're supposed to, right?

Bad move. When I made the elevator car into a func_train it included too many other entities (the func_walls). Remember my rule number one for the novice mapper? I really need to take my own advice! It created some phantom brush entities that I could not find or delete, a mistake it took most of the evening to recover from.

It turns out that you don't need to use func_wall to make the transparent textures work. You can set the Render mode, FX amount, and FX color on a func_train and get the same effect. One elevator car, one entity, transparent grate sides and all.

Ah, but what about the control buttons? Func_button entities, and I wanted them in the elevator car. This called for a bit of trickery. I made a very nice control button as part of the elevator car - but that button was purely decorative and didn't really do anything. immediately in front of this dummy button I placed a second, invisible brush that was the real func_button entity. The real button is not part of the car, and stays behind when the car moves. Down below, a second invisible func_button waits, so when the car stops you can trigger it and go back up.

The final challenge was placing the path_corner entities. These guide the func_train, so I needed two of them, one at the top and the other at the bottom, each with the "wait for retrigger" flag set. That way the elevator would stop when it reached one, and not move until the button was used again. The challenge here was that a func_train will stops exactly centered on the path_corner - placing the path corner so that the floor of the elevator car would line up exactly with the destination floor took some calculating.

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