Hello Room

This tutorial will teach you how to make your first room, complete with player start, textures, and a light. This tutorial just covers the very basics and does not get in depth with anything unnecessary. You will learn some very useful basics on using the editor though.

Making the room
Step 1: Run the editor. When the editor first comes up it is in "Brush Mode" and ready for you to build a room. You can tell what mode you are in by looking at the little "Mode" pull-down box at thetop left side of the editors main interface. You will see a Cyan (blue-green) colored cube in all four views. This is your "cookie cutter" brush that shows you the shape and size a brush will be when you create them.

The other thing you see in the four views is a green player icon. This marks the player start position. You need to make sure the player start is in your world before trying to play a level in the game. The player start can be placed any where in your level. It is initially placed at 0, 0, 0. If you want to "move" the player start, go into "Object" mode and double click on "Player Start" in the object creation pane on the left. This will create a singe player start using the camera's current location and orientation.

Step 2: Since we are already in brush mode, all we need to do is think of the type of room we want to make. Let’s make a 6 sided room (hexagon shaped). Select the "Shape" pull-down over in the Brush Properties area and select "Cylinder". This will change the cookie cutter into the shape of a cylinder.

Step 3: Let’s change some properties on the cylinder cookie cutter to make our room. Since we want our room to have air in it and not be solid, we will leave the "Type" pull-down to it’s default of "Air". The default height of 4 meters is fine also.

Let’s make the room a little bigger by changing the cylinder radius to 4 meters.

Now lets make this cylinder have 6 sides (a hexagon) like we wanted by changing it’s "Sides" value to 6.

Step 4: There, we are now ready to make our room. Hit the big "Create Brush" button and your room will be made and textured with the default texture. Now hit the SPACEBAR to rebuild the level. This will make sure everything if calculated properly so you can do things like texturing (which is the next step in this tutorial actually).

Texturing the room
Step 5: Now we should put some nice textures on the floor, ceiling, and walls. This means we need to go into "Texture Mode". Select "Texture" from the Mode pull-down or use the SHIFT+T hot-key combo. Notice when you change modes the interface changes as well to things that are useful for the Mode you are currently in.

Step 6: This new interface shows a window (thumbnail) with your current default texture. Below this thumbnail view are two pull-down boxes. The first/top one shows a list of the textures in the texture directory you are currently in. Next to this pull-down box are two arrow buttons. These buttons allow you to "scroll" through all the textures in your currently selected directory. The second pull-down box lets you change to the various texture directories. These directories are fairly self explanatory and contain textures of those types/purpose.

Step 7: First let’s texture the walls. First we need to select the wall faces to do this. In the 3D preview window select ANY face of your room by putting you mouse pointer over it and clicking with the left mouse button. That face should now highlight in green. Since we have so many faces to texture, let’s take a very useful shortcut. While you have that face selected (it’s highlighted in green), press SHIFT+S. This will tell the editor to select ALL the faces of that brush. All your brush faces should now be green.

Now use the directory pull-down box and select the "Wall - Metal" texture directory (you may need to scroll down to it). The texture thumbnail window will change to show you the first texture in that directory. Select a cool looking wall texture by using the arrow "Scroll" buttons or use the pull-down box next to the buttons. You can also use the "Browse" button to bring up and advanced texture browser, but that will be covered in a different tutorial. Once you have the texture you want to use selected, just press the "Apply" button right below the texture directory pull-down box. You should see the textures change on the faces- don't worry about the floor/ceiling for now.

Step 8: You may notice that some of the faces have the textures facing in different direction. This is easily fixed by telling the editor how we want it to "map" the texture onto the faces. A little further down in the interface you will see one more pull-down box that says "Box" in it. Hit the "Apply Map" button just to the right of this pull-down box. This will tell the editor to use a box mapping technique on the faces and will align your textures better. More advanced texturing and info is beyond the scope of this tutorial.

Step 9: Now let’s put a new texture on the floor. Before we can do that we need to de-select all those faces. To do that just click with your left mouse button over a blank area of any of the four preview windows- the faces should no longer be green.

In the 3D preview window select the floor face by putting you mouse pointer over it and clicking with the left mouse button- that face will highlight in green. Now use the directory pull-down box and select the "Floor - Metal" texture directory. Pick a cool texture and hit the "Apply" button. Repeat this step for the ceiling.

Lighting the room
Step 10: Now we have a room that is textured- let’s give it a light! To do that we need to go to "Object Mode" by either using the Mode pull-down box at the top left or by the hot-key combination of SHIFT+O. Once in Object Mode the interface will once again change. It now shows a pull-down box and a big tree-view window. The pull-down box let’s you select what category of objects you want to work with. We can leave that alone for right now as the object we want (light) comes up in the tree view window by default.

Step 11: Select "Light" in the tree-view window. It should highlight when you do this. This will tell the editor that we want to place a light. We will use the "Top" preview window  to place our light (also known as an orthographic window because it shows a flat 2D view of the 3D world). This window let’s you look down on your level from above it. Put the mouse pointer somewhere over the room in the view. Now hold down the "P" key while you click your left mouse button. A light should appear there (shown as a little light bulb with circles drawn to show you the range and fall off of the light).

Step 12: Make sure this light is in you level by looking at all the views. If it is not, you can hold down the "M" key and the left mouse button and "drag" the light were you want. Also, you can hold down the "M" key while using the arrow keys (as well as the Page Up / Page Down keys) instead of the mouse to move the light as well.

Step 13: Now that we have the light placed in the room, it’s time to tell the editor to calculate lightmaps and lighting. Go up to the Level menu and select "Calculate Maps and Light". Also make sure you have "Show Textures with Lightmaps" selected under the "View" menu.

Finishing up
Step 14: Once you have your light in the room and the room is lit, we can now place our player start in the room. As mentioned above, the player is that little silver guy in the four window views. He should already be in your room so there is no need to move him. If you did want to move him he can be moved by selecting him while in Object Mode. This is done by clicking on him with the left mouse button. Then he can be moved just like the light in Step 12. Just make sure he is completely inside of your room!

Step 15: Now save your level into the user_maps\multi or user_maps\single directory, create a level packfile, and then select "Play Level" from the File menu.