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Doors
By Unarmed Last changed Sep
10, 2006
This tutorial will guide you through the process of
creating doors in a Counter-Strike: Source map.
There are two different doors that can be used, sliding and rotating doors,
both will be explained here. Please note that this tutorial requires that you have some
basic knowledge of Hammer.
You can download the completed VMF
here
Getting Started.
Start "Hammer"
from your SDK and if you have a map you wish to add doors to then load that. Otherwise make a simple
map with two rooms that are connected and add a few spawns and a light or two. Make sure you have two connections from
one room to the other since we are going to try two different doors. You should have
something like
this.
The Sliding Door
Choose a place in your map where you want your door. I chose the left
opening in the screenshot above. Make a brush that fills that opening but make it slightly thinner than the actual
wall and texture that as you wish. It should look something like this.
Now with your door selected we do exactly as when we created
buyzones in our first map. We right click our brush and press the Tie To Entity. (Ctrl + T). Note that there
is also a button on the right in Hammer labeled "To Entity" which does the exact same thing. You should
now see a box with a dropdown list to your upper left. Select func_door from said list.
The observant will now notice that the window is still referring to this entity as a func_detail.
This will be changed once we press "apply" or close the window.
As you can see there are quite a few
keyvalues that can be set for a func_door. After you have finished
this tutorial I strongly recommend you to play around with them and see what they do to your door. We are
now going to take a look at the most important ones.
Down near the bottom you will find maybe the most
important keyvalue of them all for a door. This is named
"Move Direction (Pitch Yaw Roll)". This keyvalue specifies in which direction the door will move when opened.
The distance a door moves is the size of the door itself, i.e. if a door moves up it moves the same distance
as the door is high. The distance a door moves can be altered by the "Lip"
keyvalue. Any number entered as a
lip value will be reduced from the doors movement. If you want to make a door travel further then its own size
enter a negative value.
Enough background, lets get started. Click "Move direction (Pitch Yaw Roll)" if you
haven't done that already.
As you can now see there are several helpers to get your doors moving right. At the top there is a little box
that should have "0 0 0" written in it. These are the Pitch, Yaw and Roll
values for your door, they tell it
where to move! If you are like me and can never remember which one is which there are some helpers.
There is a little drop down menu in which "up" & "down" can be selected. There is also a little circle in
which you can point the direction of the door. Note that this circle will only make your door move sideways
never up/down. And last there is a little button labeled "point at" which if clicked will give you a little
crosshair in the 3d view and then you can simply click in the direction you want your door to move.
Looking at my door I can see that it will look
best if it moves upwards, so I simply select "up" from the
dropdown list.
Having done that you will see that the Pitch Yaw and Roll values
change.
I want my door to stop a few
units before the ceiling so I also
entered a value of "8" as a "Lip" keyvalue.
Now lets make our doors noisy
as well. There are two keyvalues for this. Lets start with the first one,
"Start Sound". This is simply the sound a door makes when it starts to move. Click that and then click "Browse"
and select a sound of your liking. Note that you can filter for things like "door" to find your sound
more easily. Also note that some sounds will not be played in Hammer. Changing the "Sound Type" to
"Raw" instead of "Game Files" will give you only sounds that will play in Hammer also. I chose
"doors/metal_move1.wav"
Now our door will make a noise when it starts to move. However this sound will only play until the sound
is finished. I want it to loop until the door is fully opened. To get this effect i set the "Loop Moving Sound?"
keyvalue to "yes". Now do the same thing again but this time set a StopSound for our door. For this I chose
"doors/metal_stop1.wav". The stop sound can not be looped.
There are a few more values that need to be set on this door, the first one being "Speed". Speed is measured
as Hammer units/second. Speed is set to "100" on doors. Since my walls are 128 units high the door will
be open in just above one second. I want it to be slower so I set speed to "30"
There is also a value named "Delay Before Reset" which tells the door how long, in seconds, it should
stay opened before closing again. I want my door to stay open so I set that value to -1.
That's all the keyvalues we need to set! However we do need to change a few more things.
Click the "Flags" tab up near the top to move away from the "Class info" tab.
This tab contains all the flags that can be set for the door. If any of you clicked the "apply" button you
should now see those flags. For those like me, who didn't, see only a blank window. Click the apply button
in the lower right corner and the flags show up. Also note how the name of the window now changes to "func_door"
instead of "func_detail".
Listed here are the flags you can set for your door. Most of them are very self-explaining. I
don't want the
player to open the door only by touch, I want them to press "use" to open it. Therefore I uncheck "Touch Opens"
and check "Use Opens". Note that you can have both active at the same time, should you want to. We can leave
the rest of the flags unchecked.
Woohoo! We now have a fully functioning door which makes noises and opens on use! Things could hardly be
better, eh? Do compile your map now and make sure that you got everything right before we move on to the
slightly more complex func_door_rotating. Should you ever want to access the settings for the door again
all you need to do is select your door and press Alt + Enter to bring up it's properties. "Tie To Entity" is
only used the very first time to transform your brush into a door.
The Rotating Door
Great. Now to fill the second hole between these rooms. Just like with the func_door, create a brush that
fills the hole but is slightly thinner than the wall. Also give it a nice texture. Some of you might feel that
since many door textures contain a black border it can be a bit hard to make your doors look nice.
Don't worry
about that now, this tutorial is for doors, not texture application.
Now, a rotating door always rotates around something but how can Hammer know what the door should rotate around?
how is Hammer going to know where the "hinges" of this door is? The answer is toolsorigin. Open your materials browser and
select the material "toolsorigin".
Now make a brush with all sides textured as toolsorigin where the center of this brush is exactly where you want the
"hinge" of your door to be. This will mean that parts of your origin brush will be placed inside a wall or
another object. This is fine as long as the origin brush stays inside your map. You should have something like
this.
Now select both your door brush and your origin brush and tie them to an entity (Ctrl + T).
From the box that appears select "func_door_rotating from the dropdown list.
As you can see the keyvalues for a func_door_rotating are very similar to the ones of a func_door.
Of course
the func_door_rotating has no "Move Direction" since it rotates around its origin brush, instead it has
a keyvalue named "distance" which controls the distance the door rotates in degrees. This time I will
not change any of the keyvalues, giving us a door that moves 90 degrees and then closes again after 4 seconds since that is what
the values are set to. If you like, feel free to edit them as you wish to customize your door, just like we
did last time.
The flags of a func_door_rotating are also similar to those of the the func_door. You will however notice
two very interesting new flags named "X Axis" and "Y Axis". By default a func_door_rotating rotates around the
Z (up/down) axis just like your doors normally do. However this is not
necessary. Should you want to make a
rotating door that rotates around another axis, simply select the axis you want. Looking at your map from the
top view in hammer X is across, Y is up/down and Z is Up/down when looking at your map from any of the other 2
views.
I am however happy with the flags as they are now and I'll leave them alone
as well, leaving us with a door
that now opens on touch instead of on use. And just like that we now have a rotating door in our map
as well.
Compile and run!
Final Result
Well done! You now master both sliding and rotating doors in the source engine! If you have been
playing around a bit or just kept your eyes open you might have noticed that all the help messages in Hammer
regarding the doors have referred to a button and not a door. This is because a button and a door are two entities
which are extremely similar and VALVe were lazy and just copied the help from the button to the door.
This means that you should have no problems using your new skills to create not only doors but also buttons!
I hope this tutorial taught you something, should you have any comments or suggestions feel free to contact
me at Unarmedmaps@gmail.com.
//Unarmed
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