![]() ![]() ![]() Lesson 6 - Moving LiftsOne of the neat things about Quake is that it's a true 3D game; you can jump up on things, you can have rooms on top of rooms, you can make bridges that cross over other bridges, etc. Doom was only a psuedo-3D game; you could simulate some (but certainly not all) of these things, but they never had that full 3D feeling, and now that I've played Quake for a while, I really notice the limitations Doom presented. So, since we're playing a 3D game, let's expand our map by allowing the player to move in the third dimension. In this lesson, we'll discover how to use moving platforms to create a lift. You thought teleporters were easy? A basic lift is even more easy than that. So let's get started. You'll need the file we've been working with in the earlier lessons. If you worked through all the lessons so far, you should have a file called 'Lesson5.map'. If you don't have it, or if you've played around with yours so it doesn't match mine, you can download it here. Make a copy of this file and call it Lesson6.map. Now load Lesson6.map into BSP and we're off and running. Before we make our actual lift, I'm going to add a couple of light globes to this second room. That room is still pretty dark, which may be great for atmosphere, but makes it hard to see the objects we're creating. In the Top View, draw a brush from (-584, 208) to (-568, 192) and make it into a 'light_globe' entity. Go ahead and assign it a key/value pair of 'light' '300'. Now drag this brush up so that it sits against the underside of the ceiling. Now copy this light and paste another copy into your map and drag this new entity so that the center is at (-576, 0). Copy and paste it again, dragging the center of the third light to (-576, -200)This should provide enough light for us to see what we're doing now. Alright, let's make a lift. First thing to understand about lifts is that you must draw them as they will look extended vertically, but Quake will start them out in the lowered position. You have to draw them that way so that they will be lit properly when Light runs. Keeping that in mind, let's draw a new 64x64 brush, 8 units tall. Center this brush on (-480, 224) in the Top View and raise it up so that the bottom of this brush sits on 128 in the Z axis. Let's apply the texture 'PLAT_TOP2' to this brush. This brush will make the actual platform the player will ride. Now, if you wanted, we could turn this into a lift entity and our lift would work, but the platform would not have any visible support structure. That's okay, but it looks kind of unrealistic (yeah, like Quake is realistic to begin with), but I digress. To correct this, let's make a platform stem for our lift to sit on. Draw a new 16x16 brush (also centered on (-480, 224) in the Top View) which extends from the floor up to 128 on the Z axis. This will make it butt up against the bottom of our platform. Go ahead and give it the 'PLAT_STEM' texture. Now we're ready to make our actual lift entity. Select both the platform and stem brushes. You may need to go to the 3D wireframe view to get them both selected at the same time. With both brushes selected, switch over to the Entity Window and make a 'func_plat' entity. By selecting both brushes at once, this will connect the two brushes together and make them operate as one unit. We could have selected each one individually, but then there might be times when only the stem moves or other times when only the platform moves; neither effect is desirable. While you're in the entity window, we also want to assign 2 key/value pairs to this entity. The first one is 'height' '128'. This tells Quake that the lift will extend 128 units in the vertical direction. From the way we are drawing it, when Quake runs, it will start the lift out at floor level, which is what we want. The second key/value pair we want to add is 'sounds' '1', which will give our lift an electronic elevator-type sound. Now these two brushes will move together when triggered and it will appear that the stem is rising out of the floor to lift the platform into the air. A little more realistic than just having a floating platform, don't you think? Believe it or not, that's all there is to making a lift. Save your map as 'Lesson6.map'. Compile it and run it in Quake to check it out. If you've done everything right, you should have a functioning lift that rises when you step on it, then lowers back to the ground when you step off. Here is our lift, lowered on the left, and in it's raised position on the right: ![]() ![]() Well, that wraps up lesson 6. Sorry this one is so short, but a basic lift is pretty easy. However, in the next lesson, I'll talk more about lifts. I'll show you how to make a lift that starts in the 'up' position (not as easy as you think) and I'll show you how to connect a button to a lift. See you soon. ![]() ![]() BSP is the sole creation of
Yahn Bernier. I am only a
dedicated user, reporting news and making tutorials so Yahn can spend
more time enhancing BSP. QUAKE is a registered trademark of Id Software,
Inc. QUAKE(r), the stylized reproduction of the QUAKE(r) trademark,
including, without limitation, the Q in QUAKE(r), and the images
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So there :-P
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