Odds and Ends
This section covers a few miscellaneous things that haven't been mentioned yet.
Editing multiple objects
You
can select multiple faces or objects and edit their properties
together. Fields which don't have the same value in all the selected
items display as "-" (a hyphen), or in the case of check boxes, with a
selected radio button beside the check box. If you enter a value for a
mixed-value field, that value will be applied to all items in the
selection. However, before closing the property window, you can restore
the mixed-value state by re-entering a hyphen or clicking the radio
button, and the values for that field will not be changed.
The figure below shows three examples of mixed-value fields -- Light Source, Control Panel and Initially On,
Orienting floor and ceiling textures
MarathUp
defaults to exporting floor and ceiling textures so that they
automatically tile seamlessly across adjacent polygons. Most of the
time this is what's wanted, but if you need to align a floor or ceiling
texture a particular way, you can do so using the following steps.
- Orient the texture
When
you place a texture on a floor or ceiling, Sketchup unfortunately
defaults to orienting it 90 degrees to the way Aleph One will
display it at play time. You will need to re-orient it using the Plugins>Marathon>Orient Textures command.
- Position the texture
Use Texture>Position from the contextual menu and drag the texture into the position you want.
- Tell MarathUp to use the texture position you've set
Choose Plugins>Marathon>Floor/Ceiling Properties and check "Use Sketchup texture alignment".

Note
that there's no way of making Aleph One rotate a floor or ceiling
texture, so you're stuck with the orientation that the Orient Textures
command gives you.Texturing the front faces of walls
In some rare situations, you may need to put a texture on the front face of a wall, instead of the back as is usually done. The Orient Textures command can also be used on a wall face to make the texture appear the right way around for the side it's on.
Diagnosing misaligned geometry
Sometimes
you will get a complaint that a floor face can't be found corresponding
to a ceiling, or some other geometry problem, and it's very hard to see
what's causing it.
You can get some information that may help by selecting the faces and/or edges concerned and using Plugins>Marathon>Show Coordinates. This will display the coordinates of all the vertices in the selected objects, in 1/1024ths of a world unit.
If
you select a floor and a ceiling that are supposed to correspond, for
example, you can then compare the two lists of coordinates. If the
coordinates displayed for two vertices differ by more than 0.5 on any
axis, MarathUp won't consider them to match. Note that the two lists
may not be in the same order, but each vertex from one list should
match up with something from the other one.
There should also be
the same number of vertices in each list, and this should correspond to
your idea of how many vertices the faces have. If not, you have some
extra edges somewhere -- something that you think is a single edge is
actually two or more edges. Usually you can find these by going around
the face and selecting each edge in turn.
A
very short edge may
be difficult to find this way, so another approach is to select edges
one at a time and use Show Coordinates on them until you find one with
an endpoint that doesn't match a vertex in the other face.
Once
you've found the offending edges, you may be able to fix the problem by
moving things around, or you may need to delete the edges and their
attached faces and re-draw them.
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