Exercise 6 - Control Panels

In this exercise we'll see how to make control panels and connect them to other objects.

Creating a Recharger

Things can get a bit hair-raising when you have a room full of Pfhor upstairs and only a single red shield charge, no matter how much ammo you've got. So let's add a shield recharger to the armoury.

Start by pulling out a small extension from the end of the armoury 1/2" wide and about 1/4" deep, and then push the floor and ceiling inwards by 1/4", so that you have an alcove whose back wall is 1/4" square.

 

Now apply the shield recharger texture to the back of the alcove. Zoom in until you can see the whole face clearly, choose Texture>Position from the contextual menu and drag the texture around until the yellow recharger image is lined up.



Note: MarathUp version 0.3 required placing control panel textures on the front side of a face. This is no longer required if you imported your textures using MarathUp 0.4 or later. If you imported your textures using the MarathUp 0.3 Import Textures command, you will need to reverse the face before texturing it, or manually mirror the texture by setting its Width to -1 in the Colors window.

Select the face again and choose Plugins>Marathon>Wall Properties. Set the Panel Type to "Shield recharger 2x".



If you're wondering why there are so many control panel types, it's because there are actually four sets of control panel definitions built into the engine, which use textures from different wall sets. Forge would show you a different set of control panel types depending on the wall set chosen for the level in the Environment settings. However, Aleph One doesn't restrict you to a single wall set per level, so MarathUp lets you choose any of the available types at any time.

Note that when you set a wall to be a control panel, the texture that you put on the wall is ignored at play time, and the textures used are determined by the control panel type. The number in front of each choice tells you which wall set the control panel textures will be taken from.

Export and play the map, and you should have a working shield recharger. Now you can go and do some major damage to the guys upstairs!

Creating a Door Switch

Getting into the armoury is a bit too easy at the moment, so let's lock the door and put a switch somewhere for opening it.

First we'll modify the door a little. Select the floor of the door polygon, bring up its Platform Properties, and turn off the "Player controllable" box.



Now bring up the Polygon Properties. MarathUp lets you use names instead of numbers to refer to polygons, lights and tags. Set the Name of the polygon to "Door".



Create another alcove somewhere to put the switch. I'm going to put mine around the corner in the corridor. Put a switch texture on it and line it up.



Select the switch and bring up its Wall Properties. Set the Panel Type to "Platform Switch" and the Permutation to "Door".



Export and play the level. You shouldn't be able to open the door directly now, but if you go around and flip the switch, the door should open.

In Exercise 7 we'll add a light and a control switch for it.

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