Basic Tutorials

by Jimmyjay86


Making Ladders

Getting an Enemy to Follow Waypoints

Guide to Player Index

Making an NPC Join Your Team

Making Clips

Exit Grid

Exit Grid Switch

Random Attack in Map

Speaking Entities

Comprehensive Guide to Using Photoshop to Create a Raw File



Making Ladders:

1. Go to the "View" pull down menu at the top. Check "Show Tile Bounding Box".

2. Tiles for ladders are at Generic Tiles/Ladders. The segments show up very small, so in the "Tile List Scale" field change the number from 0.5 to 5 and hit enter. Pick the segment you want to use.

3. If your ground level is at 0 and your roof level is at 13, then start at level 13. Align the first segement next to the roof and click the left mouse button to position the segment. From now on be careful not to shift the mouse from that position.

4. Hit the Page-Down key to move down a level and gently hit the left mouse button again. Keep doing this until you get to level 1. If you have a mouse or keyboard with a thumb wheel this process will be much easier.

5. Go to the "Select" field at the top and while holding down the shift key, left click each segment and Page-Up to click the next segment. Do this for the whole ladder and the bounding box will have a blue tint to it.

6. Go to the "Tools" button and click the "Climbable" option.

7. That is all - it should work perfectly. If not, practice a few times.

Getting an Enemy to Follow Waypoints:

1. In the Player Setup dialogue box, go to the player that you want to move. On the right side, click the "AI Setup" box. Make the "Controller Type" set for Waypoints. Enter 5 for the "Move Type Priority" and for the "Move Target Tag" type in Enemy-way. Leave everything else as is for now but note that if you hold down the left mouse button in the box and move the mouse upwards, you can see more options.

2. Place your enemy entity and make sure that he has a player index of 2.

3. Now place the waypoint - set the player index back to 0 and where it says "Tag", type in Enemy-way. The waypoint entity is found under the "misc" directory. Place as many as you need.

4. Click on Entity Edit and click the first waypoint you want to go to. On the left side menu slide down to where it says "Waypoint Index" and type in 1, the next entity is "Next Waypoint List" - type in 2. Do this for all of the waypoints and for the last one, the "Next Waypoint List" should be 1.

5. That should work, if it doesn't let me know.

Guide to the Player Index:

To set up a single player mission you are going to need a player character(PC) to control and also enemies or other non-player characters(NPC's) to interact with. Here is how to set them up:

1. The first step is to click on the "Level" button at the top of the level editor. On the left side screen there should now be an option button for "Player" - click it. This opens the "Player Setup" dialogue box. The default settings are "0. Scenery" and "1. Humans". You want to "Add" another Player Index - "2. Enemy". Under "Name", type "Enemy" and for type you want to use Computer. The team you can pick "2" and then click ok.

2. Now click on the "Team" button on the left side which will bring you to the "Team Setup". Highlight Team 1 and type in the name of your team - "BOS" or whatever and the same for Team 2 - "Enemy". Where all the green squares are, left-click the appropriate boxes to make them enemies or right-click them to make them friends. So in the first row, left click on the box in column 2 until you get a value of -10 and the same for Row 2, Column 1.

3. Now you want to insert the entities for your enemies. At the top of the screen click on the "Entity" box. A new menu will appear on the left side with a directory of the entities. In the Player field enter the number 2 and hit enter. Don't enter anything in the Tag field for now. Click on the directory for Actors and choose the character you want to use or find an entity that you have already created with the entity editor. Then just place him/her wherever you'd like. If you immediately click the entity editor box you can edit this entity. You may want to customize the looks of a generic figure or rotate him to face a particular direction or add things to his inventory.

4. If you want to add a PC that you control, do the same thing except put him/her/it under Player Index 1.

Making an NPC Join Your Team:

1. In the speech editor, click the "Add" button. The name of the speech goes under the "Remove" button. In the Random 1 field choose the node to assign to this speech. And under that enter an event name like "NPCspoke1".

2. For the trigger condition use "Speech Occured". Here you choose the speech event from above - "NPCspoke1".

3. For the trigger action use "Change Player". Pick the tag name you used for the entity from the list for the Unit. Then you want to change him to Player 1.

Making Clips:

You have to select a whole building first - all of it's levels, stairs, walls, roof, etc. Hold down the shift key when selecting additional things. When you have the whole thing, hit ctrl-c to copy it to the clipboard. Then click the 'save clip' button to save it with whatever name you want. Then when you want to load it, click 'load clip' and move the cursor someplace and hit ctrl-v to paste it. Paste it at the highest level that the building is in. So if the roof is at level 13, then paste it in there. It takes a little practice - don't expect to get it right the first or second time. And if you screw up, hit ctrl-z to undo.

Exit Grid:

To make an exit grid is easy - just select the tiles you want and go to the tools pull-down menu and click 'exit'. Now it won't show up green right away, so scroll your screen over and then back - voila, green exit-grid. To make the grid pop up at the appropriate time use a trigger. Set the action to 'Toggle Exit Grid' and the condition to whatever.

Exit Grid Switch:

1. Create your exit grid by selecting the tiles and clicking the Tools pull down menu and clicking 'Exit'.

2. Click on entity and find the switch you want to use. Give it a 'Tag Name', 'exit' for example.

3. Create a new trigger with a new condition.

Object Script State of 'exit'

4. Create a new action.

Turn Exit Grids 'On'

Random Attack in a Map:

Just set up a small zone on the map and have a NPC wander around with way points. Whenever your PC and the NPC are in the zone at the same time, he will start attacking you. Everywhere else, he will just ignore you. Use a trigger to set it up:

Conditions:

Player 1 has more than 0 alive at zone 'attack'

Player 3 has more than 0 alive at zone 'attack'

Actions:

Change units Player 3 to Player 4

Keep player 3 set as a neutral team and player 4 as an enemy team.

Speaking Entities:

Here is a tutorial on something I just figured out. Remember in the earlier Fallouts you could click on things and get funny sayings? Well here is how to do that. This works mostly on entities but can be used with most any tile object too.

1. Go in the entity editor and open the entity that is supposed to talk. In the Display Name field, place a name like 'Sign1' and save the entity.

2. Add the entity to your map as scenery.

3. Create new line in items.txt with entry:

name_Sign1 = {52nd & Broadway}

4. If you want plain tile objects to 'speak', create a new entity called 'Phone' for instance. Use a sprite of something small like a bullet or create a new sprite of a small box.

5. Place the entity behind the phone booth tile object so it is not visible.

6. Create a new line in items.txt:

name_Phone = {Please deposit 35 cents please...}

Comprehensive guide to using photoshop to create a raw file:

1. Open your jpeg or gif file.

2. Hand color the background into one single darker color. Make sure it does not share a color with your image.

3. Use the magic wand tool to pick the background. Switch to the lasso tool and hold down "Shift" to add elements to the background or "Alt" to subtract areas from the background. The magic wand occasionally will select more of what it should so zoom in close and get as exact as possible.



4. Hold down "Shift+Ctrl+I" to make an inverse selection. This will select the object. Now hit Ctrl-C to copy the selection.



5. Go to "Image-Mode-Indexed Color" and use the default values of Adaptive palette, 8 bits/pixel color depth, 256 colors, and no dither.

6. There will be a toolbar for layers and channels on your desktop. Switch to the tab for channels. There should be one channel labeled "Index". On the bottom of that tool window there are 4 icons. Pick the icon that says "Create New Channel" when you hover the cursor over it. This will create an alpha channel. Click the empty gray box to the left of the Index channel. Make sure the alpha channel is still highlighted and hit the delete key. The object should show up now. Hit Ctrl-D to deselect.

7. While you are still in indexed color mode, go to Image-Mode-Color Table and save the color table. Hit the "OK" button. [Note: this is the palette you're using. You don't have to do it for each image you create.That was a mistake I did before realising you can actually import it in all 3 sizes of the sprite.]

8. Go to Image-Image Size and size your image to the size of the guibig as outlined below.

9. Save as a raw image with interleaved order and hit ok again.

10. Scale down the image twice more and save one for the guismall and the default images. [for the default images you can play with mirroring the image to get the directions you want]

11. Import them in Spray.

Typical image sizes:

Book

guismall-48x27

guibig-96x53

default-19x11

Gun

guismall-42x27

guibig-84x52

default-18x9

Armour

guismall-51x27

guibig-101x54

default-35x32

Ammo

guismall-59x27

guibig-116x53

default-11x6

Follow these guidelines closely, especially for heights. Otherwise there will be funny things happening in your gui screen.