Exercise 10 - Level Properties, Notes, Landscapes

In this exercise we'll cover a range of small topics.

Setting the Level Properties

The Plugins>Marathon>Level Properties command brings up a window for setting various level-wide parameters. Let's take the opportunity to give our level a suitably silly name.



I'm not sure whether the Environment setting makes a difference any more, because Aleph One seems happy to load textures from multiple wall sets at once, but it's there if you need it for anything.

The Environment flags, Level Type flags and Mission Type flags are the same as in Forge. If you don't choose a Level Type, MarathUp will set it to Single Player for you.

The Physics Model choices may seem a bit strange. Forge has a setting called "Landscape" that actually does two things: it determines which landscape texture you get to use, and it sets the physics model index. MarathUp handles landscape texture numbers the same way as any other texure, so here the setting only controls the physics model.

Theoretically you should be able to enter a number into the Music Index field to select a piece of music for your level from those available, but I haven't tested this yet.

Adding a Note

The object in Objects.skp that looks like a blue pushpin represents a note that appears on the overhead map. Let's add one to the swimming pool.



Open the Object Properties window and type in some text for the note.



Now when you play the map, the level name you chose should appear on the overhead map, and when you've explored the swimming pool, the note as well.

Landscape Textures

Landscape textures are a little special, as they can only be applied with a Transfer Mode of "Landscape" -- if you try to use any other mode with them, the wall will appear untextured. Although you can select this mode manually, it's a bit tedious doing this for every wall, so MarathUp provides another way. If you append "-L" to the end of the name of a texture material, Marathup will automatically set the transfer mode of any walls you use it on to Landscape in the exported map.

There are four landscape textures in the standard Marathon 2 and Infinity Shapes files, one in each of the texture collections 27, 28, 29 and 30. So the corresponding Sketchup textures should be named 27-0-L, 28-0-L, 29-0-L and 30-0-L.

There's an example texture image called Landscape1.jpeg in the MarathUp distribution to try this out with. Create a new texture, load this texture file into it and name it 27-0-L. Set the height of the texture to 1" and click the Close button.



Now let's make a window in the pool room to use it on. Mark off a rectangle set 1/8" in from the edges of the wall and pull it out 1/8".




Apply the landscape texture. There's no way to make it look like a landscape in Sketchup, but that doesn't matter.



Export and play the map, and if you've named the texture correctly, it should work.

In Exercise 11, we'll polish off our little level by adding a terminal.

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