Doors of Doom - Deaths Doorstep

The objective of this tutorial is to learn how to add ladders to maps for Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory using the Radiant map editor. We will be adding on to our Doors of Doom 2 tutorial. (Click Here to Go To It)

Last Update: August 7, 2004

Step 1. That floor looks like a roof?

So you may have noticed from the last map that when we changed the texture on the ceiling of the first floor it changes the texture of the floor of the second floor. This is because they are the same brush, just different faces. How do we select only one face of a brush? First hit ESC to make sure nothing else is selected, now CTRL-SHIFT-Left Click on the floor of the second storey. You'll see that you don't even select the whole floor since the surface was cut up when we cut a hole in it for the stairs. Now CTRL-ALT-SHIFT-Left Click on the remaining sections of the floor until you have the entire floor. If you float around in your 3D view you'll see that you have not selected any of the ceiling below. Now click on our normal floor texture and pow, we've changed just one face of the brush.

Step 2. Preparing for our Ladder

Let's make a hole in the floor now the same as before by drawing a brush where we want the hole and click on the CSG-SUBTRACT button to subtract it from the current floor (Make sure your brush doesn't hit any lights or anything below) Make sure you're hole is against an outside wall where we can put a ladder. I've used a corner across from where my Allies are spawning. We now have two ways down to the main floor. Oh man, you throw this map on your clan server and you'll be hero for a month! Now let's adder ladder.

Step 3. Building the Ladder

Enemy Territory is great for ladders. There is actually a texture in the common set that works as a ladder. Place it on a brush in front of anything you want to be climbable. Which is awesome, but if we just throw the ladder text on a brush in front of a wall, there's not a lot of signal to the player that it's a ladder. So first let's make something that Looks like a ladder. Then we'll put a ladder textured brush in front of it and pow, we have a working ladder.

So I started by switching my grid size to 4 and drawing a thing bar up from the floor of level 1 up past the floor of level 2. I textured this bar with a texture from the metal set of textures. I think hit the space bar to duplicate this rail and moved it over about the distance of one person.

Now that we had our rails we needed rungs. The easiest by far way to do this is to draw one big brush and apply an alpha texture to it. Alpha textures are textures that have an alpha or transparent section. Conveniently if your look in your alpha texture folder you will find textures for all sorts of different railings and a LADDER. So first draw a brush that fills in the entire section between the rails and then apply this alpha -> ladder texture to it. You should have something similar to mine screen shot. Although this texture looks like it has black between the rungs while your designing it will be transparent once you compile the map.

Step 4. Make it climable

This is the easiest step yet. Create a brush just in front of your ladder that is about the same thickness. Now open your common textures and apply the ladder texture. This section is now climbable. It's that easy! Don't make your brush too big or else it will look like the player is climbing in thin air in front of the ladder. Give it a compile and you should get something similar to this: (This map is getting so exciting now!)

Step 5. Textures ... YEEEEAAAAAA!

Ok. Here's what happens. You are happily using textures in Radiant like crazy. Then you remove all the other custom maps from your etmain folder and ... WHAT HAPPENED? ... all the textures are gone? It's important to remember that Radiant is looking in all those .pk3 files for textures. If you happen to use a texture from somebody elses map (as I did :D) then that texture will be replaced with the old black and orange when you go to serve it to someone else. So to test that your map is going to work on someone elses server, you have to remove all of the other custom maps from your etmain folder. If you do need textures you can export them from PakScape and then include that folder in your textures folder. If you see a texture in radiant under "Citadel" then "Citadel_wall" than chance are that texture is stored in the .PK3 file for the Citadel map under the textures/citadel folder.

What about if you want to create your own textures? I recommend you save them out of Photoshop or whatever you are using as .tga AND .jpg files and put them in a textures/mapname folder so that you can add other folders. Also it lets designers know where to find that texture if they wind up using it in their own map. If you name the .tga file as mapname_wall.tga or ceiling or whatever that will help as well. When saving your .tga files remember to save them in either 24-bit or 32-bit colour or else when you compile the map it will stop to let you know that it does not accept anything else.

Ok. Now that we know more about textures, let's talk about what to do if we don't want them:

Step 6. I love the Caulk

If a player is not going to see the surface of a brush than there is really no point applying a texture to it. Instead you want to apply a texture from the common set called caulk. So anywhere where a player will not be able to see (example: the outside of our box) use your CTRL-SHIFT-LEFT CLICK to select just that face and apply the caulk texture. Now if we were starting over, it would be a could idea to start by making your brush out of caulk and then just apply textures to the surfaces that will be seen by the players.

Step 7. Last note on Textures this Tutorial

Okay, so we've learned that textures are awesome and we need them. We've also learned that if we take them from other maps we need to resave them in our own map. (You should not steal them from other maps). If we create our own textures we know we should name them mapname_texturename.tga and save them in the textures/mapname/ folder. Now that's all great, but you may notice that textures you save to this folder and then package do not necesarily show up properly. This is where the shader comes in. We are about to create our first shader! Do not get scared. This is actually pretty easy. Here's how I did mine:

First, each texture must be in a multiple of 2 in each direction. So when creating your texture in photoshop or whatever, be sure to make it 32x64 or 64x128 or 256x256, etc. as long as each length is a multiple of 2. Just remember your binary, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048 and onward. Each length must be one of these, it does not have to be a square like 256 x 256 but it must use binary coordinates like 256 x 128.

Now that you have a texture and you have save it in your /textures/mapname/mapname_textures.tga and .jpg files. (if you haven't you can get my texture from here: dockaos.jpg and here: dockaos.tga save them in /textures/doortut2/) So now we need a shader. Create a new text file in your /scripts folder and call it doortut2.shader (or whatever you have called your map) Make sure it does not get a .txt extension if you save it from Notepad. In your doortut2.shader we need the following to make a "decal" shader.

	textures/doortut2/dockaos
	{
		polygonoffset
		implicitmap -
	}

That's it. We only need the polygonoffset so that we can use it as a decal. There are other options you can add so that your texture makes certain sounds when walked on, and also to make it landmineable or not.

	surfaceparm	gravelsteps
	surfaceparm landmine

There is also:

	surfaceparm grasssteps
	

After adding these files I created a brush (using caulk as the base texture) and made it only go half way through the wall (to prevent leakage) I then applied my dockaos texture form the doortut2 file. Note that I added the name polygonoffset only since I was about to make my texture exactly in line with the rest of a wall. I then applied my custom texture only to the front surface by using CTRL-SHIFT-LEFT CLICK to select one face. Once I had applied the texture I needed to hit 's' to bring up the surface properties. I then hit "FIT" and apply to force fit the texture to the size of the brush. Then done! I now have a custom poster on the wall:

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If you have any questions or find any errors or omissions please let me know at dockaos at rolandit.com