My Idea (Door Tool)

[AveryMaurice]

To me and many other people, making Doors often results in glitches and is a pretty complicated task to do. What I want to see is a "Door Tool" which lets you select the dimensions and the textures, and then you just have to click somewhere to place it in. CodeImp, would this be possible in later versions?

[Use]

Hah what? A door is just 2 or three basic sectors! But seriously, in one of my old editors it featured a door tool, which could be selected to draw a door facing north/south or east/west. It was a quick way to plop one in.

[esselfortium]

Selecting the dimensions and the textures to plop a door into the map seems like overkill, but it'd be useful to have something that takes an already-existing sector, puts the standard Door triggers on the outer 2-sided lines, gives it lower-unpegged DOORTRAK on the inner 1-sided lines, and makes sure the trigger lines are facing outwards.

[Kyka]

Use3D said:

Hah what? A door is just 2 or three basic sectors! But seriously, in one of my old editors it featured a door tool, which could be selected to draw a door facing north/south or east/west. It was a quick way to plop one in.

Was that DEU? I seem to remember one of my old editors having a door creating tool.

esselfortium said:

Selecting the dimensions and the textures to plop a door into the map seems like overkill, but it'd be useful to have something that takes an already-existing sector, puts the standard Door triggers on the outer 2-sided lines, gives it lower-unpegged DOORTRAK on the inner 1-sided lines, and makes sure the trigger lines are facing outwards.

Totally.

[Use]

Kyka said:

Was that DEU? I seem to remember one of my old editors having a door creating tool.

Nope, Renegade DoomED

[Kyka]

Use3D said:

Nope, Renegade DoomED

Ahhh, thanks.

[CodeImp]

Maybe.

[Stupid Bunny]

This would be useful, not from the standpoint that doors are complicated to make (they aren't at all) but because there's so damn many of them in most maps and it might be convenient to have a way to quickly set up a door. What essel said, for example, sounds like a good way of implementing this.

[JonnyFive]

esselfortium said:

Selecting the dimensions and the textures to plop a door into the map seems like overkill, but it'd be useful to have something that takes an already-existing sector, puts the standard Door triggers on the outer 2-sided lines, gives it lower-unpegged DOORTRAK on the inner 1-sided lines, and makes sure the trigger lines are facing outwards.

Yes, this would be very useful to have as a time-saver.

I believe this is exactly what DEU and its variants did.

Also, allowing the user to select a specific texture to put on the door tracks would be nice for those who might have custom door track textures in their WAD.

[Patrick]

SLADE has a door tool. Where is Slayer?

[CodeImp]

I haven't seen slayer around either, not even in the doom tech channel :S

Anyway, this feature is in. SHIFT+D makes the highlighted/selected sector(s) a door. It shows the texture browser so you can pick a door texture.
- It drops the ceiling down to the floor.
- It makes the single-sided lines a DOORTRAK texture and lower-unpegged.
- It gives the double-sided lines the selected upper texture, the proper linedef action and arguments and makes sure they face outwards.
- In plain Hexen, it also gives the sector a unique tag, because Hexen requires that.

[andrewj]

CodeImp said:

In plain Hexen, it also gives the sector a unique tag, because Hexen requires that.

Certain door types in DOOM also require a tag, e.g. 63,114.

[CodeImp]

Yes, but in a Doom configuration, this feature creates a type 1 door.

[Enjay]

In DeePsea, the make sector into a door option does the following:

Drops the sector ceiling to the floor.
Puts a pre-defined texture on the Door upper (bigdoor2 by default).
Puts a predefined texture on the doortrack (doortrak by default).
Unpegs the doortrack.
Puts a predefined flat on the door ceiling (flat20 by default).
Makes the lines a Door type (with suitable speed and activation types in Hexen mode).
Flips the linedefs, if they need to be flipped, to face away from the door sector (so that they can be [used] by the player).

The textures used can all be defined in the options dialogue.

I know that you are doing most of those things, but there might be something there that you'd want to add. I find it a great time saver in DeePsea.

[CodeImp]

There are only 2 differences;

- My feature allows you to pick a door texture at the moment you create the door(s).
- It does not change the ceiling or floor texture.

And I think it is fine this way.

[Fletcher`]

DCK had this. Ctrl+D in sector mode turned all selected sectors into doors. It would open a small dropdown box where the mouse was, giving you a set of pre-defined texture/flat sets defined in the motif config.

Maybe that's what db2 should have as well, are the Motifs, those were awesome.

[Enjay]

CodeImp said:

- It does not change the ceiling or floor texture.

Personally, I find that feature a huge advantage - probably more so than the door front texture. It was added to DeePsea after I requested it. It's very easy to spot when you have messed up with the front of a door because it is staring you right in the face, but the ceiling is something you can easily miss - and I frequently did.

Sometimes I used to spend ages wandering through my maps opening doors and looking at the ceiling just to check whether I'd missed one (and I usually had). However, if you do miss one and then subsequently spot it after the map has been released, it usually looks awful because doors are usually a thin strip of a sector that many flats don't fit well on.

Your choice, of course, but I think it's a worthwhile addition.

[CodeImp]

That makes sense. But then I'll have to make a separate dialog for the Make Door feature that shows the new front/ceiling texture and allows you to click a button to open the texture browser to change that texture (because showing one texture browser after another is confusing). But that means that the whole flow of using this feature becomes slower.

[Enjay]

I can understand you not wanting to clutter things. What about a way of setting user defined defaults for the door feature? That way, the user could set the textures that they want to use and they would appear whenever the make door feature was used without there having to be a texture dialogue at the time of door creation at all.

[alien8]

Perhaps something along the lines of a separate "Level Defaults" tab in the Map Options dialog when you choose to create a new map. It could have the options to choose default wall, floor, ceiling and door textures, etc.

I'm not sure how it would look in practice, but in theory it could prove to be a clean and quick way to set up a user's default choices, and, being a tab, it would be out of the way for those users who wouldn't use it.

[CodeImp]

I think I'll go with the popup dialog anyway and make it so that the default are somewhat intuitive (using current ceiling/floor texture and previously used door texture). This decision, because you want to create different doors throughout your map, so a single default setting that is always used when making a door is not suitable IMO.