Getting
started with SinEd - Part II by Eutectic
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4. Using
the Camera view
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So far, we
did all our work in the 2D views and we haven't looked at the
3D view or Camera view yet. This view is very
important since you will be using it extensively to select
brushes and align textures. First, to make things easier,
let's hide the entities temporarily we inserted earlier
by using one of SinEd's coolest features: Filters.
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 Click on the Filters menu and then on the
Show Entities selection. This will remove the check
mark on the left and all the entities in your map will be
hidden in all the views. |

Now go to the XY view and zoom in
on the center of the map (X0, Y0). What you see is the
Z checker symbol superimposed over the Camera
symbol. Whenever you start a new map, those 2 symbols are
located there by default.
The Z checker is beyond the
scope of this tutorial so let's just move it out of the way to
have a better look at the camera symbol. Placing the mouse
cursor over it and Shift-MiddleClick-Drag to move it
across the 2D view away from the camera. |

Ah! Now that's better. Ok, just think of
the diamond shape in the middle of the Camera symbol as
an eye that sees in your map. The 2 angled lines
that extend from the diamond represents the Camera's
FOV (Field Of Vision).
Whenever you start a
new map, the Camera will be located close to the center
of the map and look in the 0 degree direction exactly
as show on the left. When you open an existing map with
the info_player_start entity inserted, the Camera will be
located where the player entity is and it will look in the
direction set by the player entity's angle key.
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Now
go the Filters menu and click on Show Entities
again. This will restore the check mark next to the option and
your entities will be displayed. Let's take a look at the
Camera view. Simply bring it in the foreground by
clicking on it.
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Hmmm. It's kinda hard to see exactly where
we are right? So we'll have to navigate the camera
position and angle to place it so we can see what we want. But
how do we do this?
Well there are basically 2 ways:
with the mouse or your keyboard keys. Let's
start with the mouse first. |
Navigating with the mouse

In order to make it easier to explain
this, I painted a yellow cross and 4 arrows over the previous
camera view. Basically, you navigate by placing the
mouse cursor in the view and using RightClick-Drag. But
if you don't know how it really works, this can prove to be
very frustrating (I know it was for me).
The yellow
cross represents the exact center of the view. If you place
the cursor exactly on that spot, press + hold the right
mouse button and don't move the mouse at all, the view
won't move. If you drag the mouse slightly above the
center, you will start moving forward slowly. The
farther you drag the mouse above the center, the
faster you will move forward. The speed at which you
drag the mouse has no effect on the view's movement speed,
it's the distance away from the center of the screen
that counts. So if you want to stop moving forward, you have
to drag the mouse back to the center or simply release the
mouse button.
So to
resume:
RightClick-Drag the mouse cursor
above the center of the view to move
forward.
RightClick-Drag the mouse cursor
below the center of the view to move
backward.
RightClick-Drag the mouse cursor
to the right of the center of the view to turn
right.
RightClick-Drag the mouse cursor
to the left of the center of the view to turn
left.
Other essential mouse
navigation details:
Ctrl-RightClick-Drag
the mouse cursor to strafe sideways and vertically in
the view. Contrarily to the above controls, the view only
moves when you move the
mouse.
Ctrl-Alt-RightClick-Drag the mouse cursor
to freelook with the camera. This enables you to look
and all around you (up, down, left and right) in the view but
doesn't move the camera.
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Navigating with the keyboard
Some people may
not feel comfortable with the mouse navigation controls.
Personally, apart from strafe and freelook, I don't like them
at all. I find it's pretty much like trying to fly a
helicopter... very touchy. Fortunately, there are keyboard
navigation keys and those are pretty much the same as the
keyboard movement controls in the game itself. Here's the
list:
Up Arrow: move forward.
Down
Arrow: move backward.
Right Arrow: turn
right.
Left Arrow: turn
left.
>: strafe right.
<:
strafe left.
D: move up.
C: move
down.
A: look up.
Z: look
down.
Page Up: move up one floor.
Page
Down: move down one floor.
End: reset view
straight and level. Particularly useful when you need to look
straight at something and you previously used that nasty
RightClick in the view.
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An important feature to note
When moving the
Camera with the keyboard keys, you may on some occasions, find
it hard to position the camera really close to a brush without
going "too far". This is because the camera moves at fixed
increments or steps which are rather large by default. SinEd
has a really cool feature for this called Camera Grid
move.
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This option can be set in the View
menu. When you start SinEd, it's disabled by default. What it
does is that it makes your Camera move in increments
equal to the current grid setting. So if the option is
checked and your grid is set at 8, everytime you
use the keyboard keys to move the camera forward, backward,
sideways, up or down, it will do so in steps of 8 map
units for each keystroke.
So if you need to get
real close to a small brush face for some accurate texture
alignment work, this is a godsend. Just set your grid to a
small setting like 2 for really fine camera movements.
Whenever you need to move faster (by larger increments),
change your grid setting to a large value like 32 or 64.
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5.
Working with textures
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Now that we
know how to navigate in the Camera view, let's move around to
see what our room looks like. As you will quickly notice, the
walls don't look too bad but the floor and ceiling don't look
good at all. To fix this, we're going to assign them some
proper textures.
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Position the camera in a way that you can
see the floor brush and select it by doing a
Shift-LeftClick on it. The brush will be highlighted in
red in all the views. |

Then, scroll the texture
selection window until you find the texture named
fl_hcfloor1 and click on it. |

All the faces of your brush is now
textured with fl_hcfloor1. To unselect your brush, hit
ESC or you can do a Shift-LeftClick on it. Doing
a Shift-LeftClick on a previously selected brush or
entity will simply unselect it.
Next, select the
ceiling brush, find the texture named tr_hcmarbflat and
click on it. Now your room is starting to look a bit more
decent. |
The
next step is to learn how to align textures. SinEd is very
powerful and user friendly when it comes to this. Navigate the
Camera view up close to one of the walls and low enough to see
where it meets the floor. Remember, if you're having trouble
positioning the camera the way you want with the keyboard, you
can always use Camera Grid move.
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If you look closely at the bottom
of the wall, you can see that the texture is not aligned quite
right. This is because the floor brush is 8 units thick and
therefore 8 units above the bottom of the wall brush
from where the texture is aligned by default (at the Z=0
mark). So we're going to have to give it a vertical
offset to align it with the floor level. |

Here instead of selecting the whole
brush and therefore giving an offset to the texture
on all the faces of the brush, we will select only the
brush face that matters. Since all the other faces of the
won't be visible in the game, it wouldn't make any difference
in this case but it's better to get into good habits right
away. Also, I want to take the occasion to show you how to
select only 1 brush face :)
Select a single brush face
by doing a Ctrl-Shift-Leftclick on it. |

To offset the texture, place the mouse
cursor over it and Shift-MiddleClick-Drag upwards. An
important thing to note here is that the texture will always
shift in increments equal to your grid setting
when using this method. So make sure your grid is set at
8 or less for this example otherwise you won't be able
to align it as shown on the left.
Also, the texture can
be shifted horizontally if you drag the mouse sideways instead
of up and down. But it's not necessary in this case.
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At
this point, what we need to do is to give the texture on the
other 3 walls the same offset we just gave to the first one.
Of course, we could just repeat the operation above for each
of the remaining walls but there are 2 ways to do this
which are much faster and easier. I want to
describe those 2 methods also to demonstrate the power of
SinEd when it comes to texturing.
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Method 1:
This technique requires that you
do not have any brush faces selected so to make sure
that's the case, hit ESC before you start.
SinEd
lets you grab a texture along with all its offset,
rotation, scale values and its surface properties. This is
done by placing the mouse cursor over the brush face and doing
a MiddleClick. Do this on the brush face you aligned
earlier. The texture is now in a sort of memory
buffer.
A nice thing about this is that SinEd is
also capable of applying the texture you just grabbed on any
brush face you want without having to select anything. You can
do this by placing the mouse cursor over the face on which you
want to apply the grabbed texture and doing a
Ctrl-Shift-MiddleClick. So all you have to do now is to
do this on the other 3 walls and you're all set. All your wall
textures are aligned. Not bad huh?
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Method 2:
If you tried the previous method,
all your wall textures are aligned so in order to try this
method, you will have to de-align your last 3 walls. You can
do this by selecting them and clicking on the
wl_hcwall1 texture in the texture selection window.
This will reset their alignment to the texture's default
values.
Select the other 3 brush faces you want to
align (and only those). Then grab the texture from the
first wall you aligned by doing a MiddleClick on it.
All the selected brush faces will automatically be set to the
texture you grab. Now that's what a call a major time
saver!
An important thing to remember before
doing a texture grab is that you have to make sure that
only the brush faces you want to modify are
selected. Otherwise, you might accidentally screw up
the texture alignment on brush faces that took you a while to
align properly and force you to start over. It's a powerful
feature but it cuts both ways so beware. Whenever in doubt,
play it safe and hit the ESC key before
you start selecting faces.
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6.
Compiling your map
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Well, we're
done with our basic map in SinEd. Now we have to
compile the map file into a bsp file to make it
playable in Sin. Save your map and open a DOS
window.
*IMPORTANT*: Do not try to
compile your map with SinEd's Bsp menu. This simply
won't work on a Windows 95/98 machine. You must use a
DOS window for this.
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First, if
SinEd is installed on a drive other than C, you have to
go to that drive first. As can be seen in the example above,
it's the D drive in my case. So just replace the drive letter
with the one on which SinEd is installed on your machine and
type:
D: <enter>
Then you have to
go to SinEd's maps directory to compile since that's where
your map file and the make.bat DOS batch file resides.
So type:
cd \tools\sin\base\maps
<enter>
Next, you have to run the batch file that
contains the commands to compile your map. These
are:
..\..\bin\qbsp3
%1 ..\..\bin\qvis3 %1 ..\..\bin\qrad3
%1
The reason why the command is
..\..\bin\qbsp3 %1 is that your 3 compilation utilities
reside in the \tools\sin\bin folder. The ..\..\bin part
means go 2 folders up and then down to bin. The %1
symbol means variable input. During execution, the
batch program will replace the %1 variable with whatever you
typed after make. So if you saved your map as basic.map
(as instructed earlier in this tutorial IOW), you should now
type the command:
make basic
<enter>
* VERY
IMPORTANT!*:
Do not type the .map
file extension in this command! Otherwise, this will screw up
your compilation and you will get errors. Qbsp3 reads
the map file basic.map and compiles it into a bsp
file named basic.bsp. Then, qvis3 and
qrad3 both read the compiled bsp file and add
PVS and LIGHTING information to it. They don't use the map
file as input. So DO NOT type "make
basic.map".
So to resume:
The file extension is
implicitly assumed by the DOS compilation utilities. Qbsp3
expects a .map file as input while qvis3 and qrad3 both
expect a .bsp file as input. There is absolutely no
need to type the file extensions anyway.
Ok,
now that we got that out of the way, your map should now be
compiled. The next step is to copy the compiled
basic.bsp file from the \tools\sin\base\maps folder to
the \base\maps folder located right under the SiN game folder.
So check where you installed SiN and copy your bsp file there.
If you don't have a maps folder under base, just create it
first and then, copy the bsp file in there.
Finally,
start SiN, drop the console (~ key) and type "map basic".
Enjoy your first SiN map :)
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Part I
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