Half-Life 2 Mod: Week 6 – Switchable Chandeliers, Automatic Sliding Doors, Railings, Carpet (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog)
This was a tremendously productive weekend. After helping two fellow interactive fiction fans finish a proposal for next year’s MLA, I tackled a few things I had been meaning to get to for a while.
The first picture shows the much more realistic chandeliers that I managed to create. I’m still not entirely happy with it, but it’s good enough for the demo I’m working on now.
While I didn’t bother trying to capture it in the screen grab, I’ve also added a button that turns the chandeliers on and off. The red carpet really ought to be running up the stairs, but I’m not sure I want to tackle that yet. Already, when I do a full compile of this game world, it’s taking my little laptop 10 or so minutes. I’m not sure yet what the acronyms on the compile window means, but I fiddled with the settings so that I don’t have to do that full compile every time, which saves a lot of time.
I’m particularly proud of the railings in this picture. I didn’t take a screen grab, but I figured out how to edit the vertices so that the perfectly rectangular railing pieces join together at 45 degree angles.
The red door also slides open to reveal a room inside. I’ve got some ideas for that room, but I’m going to save them for now, and show them when the room is in really good shape.
Now that I can interact with the world in simple ways (turning on and off lights, opening doors), it’s time to start working with NPCs. I’m thinking first of just telling an NPC to walk to spot B when the PC enters spot A, and then walk to spot C when the PC enters spot B, and so on, with the NPC eventually returning to spot A. Since FacePoser crashes my laptop when I run it at home, I don’t know how much luck I’ll have working with NPCs, but Half Life 2 comes with a range of pre-set emotions and gestures, so we’ll see what I can accomplish.
Those doors I modeled in Half-Life 2, so they’re just ordinary blocks that are mashed thin along one axis. These doors slide open when you step on a proximity detector. Here’s a tutorial that describes how to make a freight elevator, with a button that will start the elevator moving…
http://www.mikevail.org/2006/12/30/half-life-2-tutorial-freight-elevator/
And here’s a YouTube video tutorial on doors (I haven’t watched it so I’m not sure it meets your needs).
Good luck.
Hi, I’m a programmer too, and I’m just geting into moding. I need to find 3D entities that are doors or gates, which will actually animate and open when the player gets neer and uses the e key, and otherwise will keep an area closed off. Also, it would be great if I could link two or more of these doors together, in such a way that when one is opened the others will remain closed permenantly. Have you ever created something like this? Your sliding red door looks like it might be very close but I would just want it thicker and metalic looking. Any help you can give me would be greatly appriciated. I can’t believe how difficult it is to find simple gates or doors.
James.