I had this idea I'd like to share. I'm a bit of a beginner, and after reading about I figure this must be pretty straightforward to you. But I'm proud of my little achievement and I'd like to tell someone hehe.

I started to make a HL multiplayer map in Hammer. It's intended to be a tricky map, where not everything is what it seems to be. Don't be afraid, though, I'm not that experienced in mapping .

My favourite part is this room, of which there are two ways to leave: either walking or dying and then respawning . Anyway, it's a rather boring cubic room with two doors and two buttons. One of them opens the doors so you can leave, the other one makes the floor open and you fall into a pit of radio slugde.

I did this a long time ago in a test map, but I quickly realised that in a multiplayer environment, by the second time you wound up in there you would know which button not to press... which gets kinda boring after the first surprise. So here I was, making a new map, when I thought of putting this room, but with a twist: the buttons would reverse their roles each time pressed. Therefore, you'd never really know which button to press, with either there is a 50% chance of leaving or dying - depending of how many others were there before. After unsuccessfully trying plain old trigger_changetargets, I realised what I needed was a combination of 4 multi_managers and 4 trigger_changetargets, effectively making a two-state machine. I suppose it could be done to cycle between many more states, but the amount of logical entities would grow exponentially.

It took me a full day to envision the complete setup, but in retrospect it wasn't really all that complicated. But I wanted to vent my frustrations and tell someone about this, someone who could understand what I was talking about (my other HL-playing friend don't know shizzle about mapping so I'd just get blank stares back).

If you haven't fallen asleep already, I thank you for taking a minute to read my little rant. Maybe I can post the finished map soon, if anyone happens to show interest. It's just a small map for a couple of n00bs on a home LAN

neat. i'll help you test it if you want...

Also let me get your objective straight. You want the button targets to just switch each time, or are you randomly assigning each button's target, each round?

Let me put it this way. Button 1 fires event A, and button 2 fires event B. At the press of any of them, their targets are switched: Button 1 now fires event B and button 2 fires event A. Until any of them is pressed again.

And now that I think of it, maybe it wouldn't be much harder to have more buttons cycling between their targets (may be fun to try eh?). But it won't be for this part.

And sure, I'll upload it if you want to playtest it. Of course, I'd have to make sure the rest of the map is worth playing...

Mapping question:

If I have a moving brush entity, which has to be built inside a world brush so that when activated it moves into place, it will look dark because no light gets to it. How do I light it? A solution for other cases would be to revert the start/activated positions, but... this is a momentary_door, and it can't be built the other way around because it's set to auto return. Any ideas?

A. you could make it a train, and have it teleport from a seperate box with lights on it(how half-life properly lighted the train at the beginning of Half-Life)

B. (what i would probably do) Make the textures of the box "impregnated" inside the world brush, into texlights. To easliy do so:

1. make a info_player_start entity
2. Simply rename the entity(class box under object properties) to "info_texlights"
3. click "add" button.
4. Under "key" type the texture name, under "value" type the color and brightness, i.e. 255 255 255 50.

If your object is made of multiple textures, you will need to maek textlight values for each one. (you can put them all in one info_texlights entity)

Experiment with brightnesses to see what looks best; I would start really low--like a brightness value of 5, and brighten as needed--, and use just enough brightness to make it show up normally.

I'd go for B) because it can't be momentary + activated by a momentary_rot_button as a train. However, I have used those textures elsewhere in the map and that would look odd. I'd hate to replace them, but I suspect that's what I'll have to do...

If it's small enough for nobody to notice uniform lighting, then just try setting the minimum light level.

Hmm... good idea. It's a whole damn platform, 512x64x16, but I guess it's worth the try. Thanks.

Edit: it worked well. Thanks again.

LOL i didn't even know minimum light level worked in HL! AWESOME

)

It never worked for me when I tried a few years ago, I guess I did something wrong then.

Never heard'z of it.

but something you HAVE heard is conversations in the shoutbox, journal, forum thread and msn at the same time, crazy stuff

Yes, you will get blasted by the mods for this... Just a warning.

LOL i didn't even know minimum light level worked in HL! AWESOME

Well I've learned a lot lately even without trying. I wonder how much has my mapping improved. At least I hope I get to finish something this ti

Alright, so there is this room I want players to go through. But it isn't particularly enticing to know you might die just for going there, so I predict everyone might just as well avoid going that way and problem solved. I want someone to actually go that way, otherwise it's just a boring part of the map noone goes to. But I can't come up with any motivation that's worth it. I just feel placing the Egon on a pedestal just won't do the trick. Any comments or ideas?

A trigger_hurt with a negative value perhaps, giving anyone who survives +400% HP?

Another possibility is teleporting survivors to some place that gives them a clear advantage, and making sure there's no way to kill them (except going through again, hope that you survive and get teleported to the same place.) This would ensure a steady flow of victims

Hmm... interesting ideas. But wouldn't a trigger_hurt with a negative value just pump you up to 100 and stop there?

Edit: it does. Too bad, it would have been awesome to have over 100%.

I don't know about HL but in CS 1.6 you can give a player over 100 HP using a trick involving func_door's 'n stuff, check out the "Walk under here to get 10 000 HP"-thingy in this .rmf: http://www.speedyshare.com/720990985.html

(I gave it a quick try in HL and it seems to work but you get pushed away when you use it, unlike CS where you can stand still under it...)

EDIT: just want to point out that I didn't make the .rmf, i just found it on the net, credit goes to whoever made it.

Whoa, something weird is going on in that map!

When I walked in there, first my health was thrown down to 4 and my suit power was something like [poison symbol]1234. I went in again and my health went up to 250 and suit power turned into something crazy like -156846856463746849999999, and then I went in again and the game crashed. Wicked map eh?

Oh right. I just read it's for CS. Maybe I should try it there.