Creating Rotating Doors in Deathmatch Maker 2

***Note: this is really the same tutorial I did up for Hexmaker, however, there are some changes in the dialogs for DMM2 vs. Hexmaker. However, I know a lot of people that use DMM2 didn’t use Hexmaker and aren’t completely familiar with the concepts involved in making rotating doors.***

***Another Important Note: DMM2, for whatever reason, has the X-Axis and Y-Axis flags available as checkboxes, however, while the X-Axis flag works, the Y-Axis flag does not. I checked the entlist.txt, and it’s written correctly, however, DMM2 doesn’t put the proper spawnflag value (128, to be exact) for that entity when the .map file is made. To have a door that rotates around the Y-Axis, you need to modify the .map file that is created by DMM2, by putting the following line "spawnflags" "128" by using Notepad or another text editor to edit the .map file. This line should be put right after the line "classname" "func_door_rotating" and you can compile the .map file by using the q2vici.exe program in the DMM2 directory.***

One of Quake II’s improvements over the original Quake engine was the addition of rotating doors. Adding rotating doors to your Quake II levels, can dramatically add to the realism to your level. In this tutorial, we’ll look at how to create a simple rotating door.

Creating the Room and Hallway

First open DMM2 (you’ll probably want to use a screen resolution of 800X600 or greater, since the DMM2 dialogs are often too small to fit in the 640X480 display window.) For this example, let’s create a room with a hallway, then put our Origin Brush and rotating door in the hallway.

In the Gallery tab, click on the triangle on the far right part of the window. From the Gallery list, select the Rooms and Halls 3D Gallery. From this gallery, drag a Large Room item into the Design Window. Now, select a Small Room from the gallery and drag it into the Design Window and position it so that it’s above (assuming you’re in Top view) the Large Room you brought in. Resize the Small Room so that it looks more like a hallway than a room.

Now, use the Connect Tool (the tool on the toolbar that looks like a hammer) to connect the two rooms together. Finally, you’ll need to use the Surface Editor (the last tool on the left of the toolbar) on the southern wall of the Small Room to make it transparent. Click on the Surface Editor tool, then click the south end of the Small Room. The Surface Editor window will be displayed and the Toolbar will be changed. Double-click the Make Transparent tool (the last tool on the left side) and you should see the hallway appear in the Walk Window. Click the Return Tool (the topmost tool) on the Toolbar to redisplay the Design Window. Figure 1 shows basically what you should be seeing in DMM2.

DMM2 uses an Origin Brush to create the axis for which the rotating door will move. By using the Origin Brush Method, you don’t have to know the exact coordinates of the axis; you can visually move the Origin Brush as needed.

Creating the Origin Brush is a pretty simple process. Once again, bring up the 3D Gallery list by clicking on the triangle at the top right side of the Gallery Tab. Select the Basic Shapes Gallery from the list. Drag a Square item from the gallery to the Design Window. Resize the Square so that it’s about 10x10 units wide. Move the Square so that it’s in the corner created by the outside of the Large and Small rooms on the left side, however, make sure it’s actually located in the Large Room.

Now click on the Textures tab. Beside the Texture Options, click on the triangle and select Add Textures. Select the e1u1/origin texture from the list and click <<<Add Textures<<< and then OK. Click on the Origin Texture from the Textures tab and drag it to the Square we just added. This will give the entire Square the Origin Texture. You’ll probably want to verify this by moving the viewer in the Walk Window. Figure 2 shows the newly created Origin Brush in both the Design Window and the Walk Window.

Figure 2 – The location of the Origin Brush with the Origin texture applied.

The next step is to create the door object geometry. Click on the Gallery tab and drag another Square object into the Design Window. Position it so that its north wall is even with the north wall of the Large Room we created. Resize it so it is about 10 units wide and the length reaches the right edge of the Small Room. You may want to zoom in to make it easier to manipulate. Now the e1u1/btelev texture really doesn’t look right for a door, so let’s select another texture. The texture named "e1u2/elev_dr1" is a good square texture to use. So, click on the Textures tab and click the triangle beside the Texture Options and add the texture "e1u2/elev_dr1." Drag the texture to the Square object we just added. Also, in the Texture Options, select the Fit This Texture to Each Side option.

The next step to creating the rotating door is to group the Origin Brush and the Square object to be used as the door together. Select both the Origin Brush and the door geometry by either dragging the mouse to enclose both or by using Shift+click to select the second object. Then, from the Design menu, choose Group. This groups the object together.

The final step is to make this group a rotating door. Right click on the grouped objects to bring up the properties window. In the Class drop-down list, select Function - Rotating Door. In the following attributes, enter the following:

Properties Tab:

Distance = 85 – This the rotation angle, in this case 85 degrees.

Flags/Vectors Tab:

Sound = Medium (make sure you have the patch or the newest entlist.txt from Deathed)

Figures 3 and 4 show the Rotating Door properties.

Click the OK button to exit the Object Properties window. Save and compile your level. Then, run the level in Quake II to see the effect of the rotating door. If you get an error stating that an Origin Brush is not allowed in this world, then your objects aren’t grouped correctly or you didn’t select the Function - Rotating Door Class. If you get the error double-check to make sure those items are correct.

We created just a very basic rotating door. As you can tell from all of the items in the Object Properties dialog, there are a variety of different options that can be set for rotating doors. You may want to play around with these different properties to get an idea of what each does. Hopefully, by the time you read this, there will be a Hexen II Entity List on DeathEd which better explains the different properties. Also, you might want to play around with the location of the door and the different angles in the Flags property to get a more realistic effect than the door in this tutorial.

Figure 5 shows what the rotating door level should look like in DMM2. Hopefully, everything works and you can see the impressive effect that a rotating door can have on your levels! Rotating doors give you the ability to create some very nice and realistic effects for doors. And when you learn all of the different propreties associated with rotating doors, you can create even more effects!

© 1998 Richard L. Neff II

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