Using area portals in
your maps.
Area Portals are handled a little bit differently in Q3 than they were in
Q2. Most of the basic rules still apply, but getting them working is much
faster than with Q2.
Simply create a brush and size it to cover your
doorway. Next, you need to make it thin. After sizing the brush, make it
about 2 grid units thick. It should fit within your doors (single brush or
multibrush doors) and you should not be able to see it from any angle when
the doors are closed. Finally, load the common texture set, and apply the
area_portal texture (a medium sized pink square, with AP on it). You
should apply this to all sides of the brush.
The door (or a teamed door) that touches the Area
Portal brush, should automatically trigger the Area Portal, no more
pointing doors at entities, etc.
CAVEATS
As with Q2, the Q3 Area Portal has some caveats.
Area Portals cannot touch more than one area once, just like in Q2, though
the errors/warnings "Areaportal touches >2 areas" or "Areaportal
touches < 2 areas" doesn't get printed out. All that happens is
the AP doesn't work. A simple way to check the validity of APs: 1. Pretend
your map is a real place.
2. Imagine filling the room on one side of the Area Portal with water.
If your map can fill up ALL THE WAY, and the water can touch the OTHER
side of the AP, then it won't work. (Only solid brushes and Area Portals
will block this imaginary water--detail brushes, models, and other
entities won't block it). If you have other doors, you'll probably need to
make them AP doors also. (Don't worry about these, they are not very
important, you can still have a great map without them.) |