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Home  Descent 3 Descent 3 construction Forcefields - Introduction
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Home Descent 3 Descent 3 construction Forcefields - Introduction
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| Forcefields - Introduction |
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| Descent 3 - Descent 3 construction | |||
| Written by Thomas | |||
| Tuesday, 28 October 2008 11:02 | |||
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There have been many question about forcefields, what they are, and how they work. This article tries to answer some of them. Simply speaking, a forcefield is nothing but a textured portal face. This implies that a textured portal can have any arbitrary texture, not just the typical "forcefield textures". By default, portals have a texture with green leaves, and the actual forcefield is turned off. In room view it's a bit difficult to select a portal face with the mouse, because in there portals are shown as just empty areas (empty faces), somehow as if they were holes in the room. To select a portal face in room view you can press the "f" key to jump from face to face until the portal face is reached. Surely, this can take a long time in rooms with many faces. It is quicker to press the "p" key (Portal) until the portal of choice is current. You can also use a right mouse click and choose "Select Face By Number" if you know the portal face's number by heart. Much easier to select a portal face is by doing it in world view. Select the portal face by clicking on it. You can tell that you have a portal face by the way it's edges are displayed. They show up in a darkish purple instead of the standard face colours. Like in room view you can also click on a room and the press the "p" key until the portal is current. Now you can texture this face with any arbitrary texture by selecting one from the texture dialog and clicking on the "To Current" button. The portal's face texture then changes to the chosen one. That still doesn't switch the forcefield on. A forcefield can only be made active (turned on) from a script. In Dallas, the command for doing that is in the actions for "Rooms". Breaking Glass explains how to toggle the forcefield. One of the disadvantages of switchable forcefields is that they break the sound coming from other rooms (See Sound stops at portal). You can work around this problem with the trick of changing the portal textures (forcefields) dynamically in Dallas.
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| Last Updated on Saturday, 12 September 2009 11:10 |
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Forcefields - Introduction
Oct 10 2010 08:23:18 I'd like to add a small step here:
You can texture a portal and turn it into a forcefield/glass/partition wall with this method... But if you test fly the level, you'll see that its texture has been misaligned. This might not be a problem if you using a funky "forcefield" effect, but certainly is if you want a neatly aligned glass texture. The editor doesn't render the faces, so aligning them are a bit tricky. But its doable. I'll explain with an example: Lets say we have two rooms, divided with a forcefield that uses the "Alien Forcefield" texture-which is a forcefield texture that forms a cross in the middle. We have a hexagonal portal, and we want to see that the "cross" intersects at the center of the portal. To do so, we must see them visually. To visually see the portals, we must first turn them into conventional faces. That can be achieved by separating the rooms. First, select the portal you want to work on by one of the methods described above. Then in world view, go to "Room" menu and select "Delete current portal", and confirm the message that asks if you really want to delete. This will separate the rooms by turning the portal faces into conventional faces, which can be visually seen. This will allow you to apply and align textures to your liking visually, like applying the "alien forcefield" texture, and aligning its "cross" to the center; for both faces. I'm not going into how its been done, it is a long and separate subject! After all set, you can simply join the rooms from the "Room" menu, by using "Join rooms", "Join rooms exact", or "Join adjacent faces" (which is the safest, in my opinion) commands. The faces will turn into portals, KEEPING their texture information. Now, you can turn it on via scripting. Hope it helps! --Shroudeye |
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