Building stairs made easy (preview)

[boris]

DB2 plugin I'm working on.

[Patrick]

this could be pretty useful. Good Job!

[Yugiboy85]

Wow, I always wanted to be able to do those curved staircase quickly, nice job, continue like that ;)

[Subatomic]

That's awesome. Stairs can be incredibly tedious to make at times; this plugin could be very useful.

[spaztacus]

Awesome. Do you have an idea of when it will be released?

[esselfortium]

That's pretty fantastic.

Out of curiosity, I wonder if there's any way that a couple of bordering methods could be implemented into this. There are some, for example if I just want trim on the sides so that I can have lowered ceiling trim along the sides of the stairway, that I can do relatively easily with careful application of the Curve Line function, and some others (such as front/left/right side borders, front side only borders, and all-sides borders). Perhaps optionally being able to do one type on the floor and another on the ceiling, with the ability to set flats, floor/ceiling height differences for the different sectors of each step, and upper/lower textures if applicable. I could definitely see this being looked at as overkill, but bordering stairs isn't all that uncommon a practice and it requires a lot of 1-unit-grid wankery and guesswork to do manually on curved stairs.

Not that I'm trying in any way to diminish what you've got here; this is looking awesome and quite useful, I'm just sayin'.

(Noting that the two screenshots were reused from another demonstration and I was referring to the type of border, not the shapes of the stairs themselves.)

[boris]

spaztacus: dunno, there's already quite some work done, but as always there's more left to do than you think.

essel: the plugin is called stair sector builder, but in the end all it does is create a bunch of sectors. And trims are just stairs with only one step, aren't they? ;)

Also:

[esselfortium]

Er, I meant trims on the steps, as doing so manually on curved steps is even more of a pain than manually drawing curved steps themselves. :P

[boris]

On the left you have your steps, with the step border lines marked.

On the right you build "stairs" with only one step, drawing them backwards and with a width of 8 units. There you have your trim.

That, of course, is the simple case, for arbitrary shapes it's a bit more complicated, but it's a planned feature and no sorcery.

[Subatomic]

Any news on the progress of this plugin?

[Reisal]

I'm looking towards this, I hope it sees the light of day so stair building is a lot easier to do.

[gggmork]

Nice. What language do you use to make plugins; is there a tutorial or something to make them?

[Subatomic]

gggmork said:

Nice. What language do you use to make plugins; is there a tutorial or something to make them?

There are two example plugins on the DB2 webpage:
http://www.doombuilder.com/index.php?p=plugins

I'm no programmer but both of them say they are, "...extremely well commented so that beginners can use this as an example to learn how to make a plugin." They may be of help to you in making your own.

[esselfortium]

Subatomic said:

Edit: I looked at the source code and they seem to be written in Assembly.

Erk...no...

[boris]

Progress is slow, but it's there :) Creating the geometry works now for pretty much all cases. Now applying textures and height changes is left, which should not be too hard I hope. Unfortunately my computer died last friday, and I can't get DB2 to compile on my notebook yet.

There's also a thread on the DB2 development forums with some more screenshots, but it's more on the technical side.

gggmork said:

Nice. What language do you use to make plugins; is there a tutorial or something to make them?

C#

[Subatomic]

esselfortium said:

Erk...no...

My mistake then. As I said, I'm not a programmer. Some of the comments in the source code say it's written in Assembly, so that's why I thought that. I guess it refers to something else.

[boris]

Another work in progress demonstration of my upcoming stair sector builder plugin for Doom Builder 2. This time is shows some advanced usage to create nice looking stairs with some trims.

[Reisal]

I've said it before and I'll say it again..this will definitely be useful and a time saver when building stairs.

[Melon]

This looks amazing, great job! I'll be trying it out as soon as it's released.

[Abyssalstudios1]

Melon said:

This looks amazing, great job! I'll be trying it out as soon as it's released.

[baronofheck82]

What everybody else said. Looking fantastic :)

[Ultraboy94]

This looks stunning... nice work! I cant wait to use it, it may make me use more stairs instead of be lazy and just have a slope.

[r_rr]

Useful little too., can't wait to try it out.

[boris]

http://boris.wadsinprogress.info/boris/db2/StairSectorBuilder.zip

As promised here's a test version of the plugin. Please not that it's not finished yet, and there are still some cases where it will crash, so you should not use in productive mapping.

It will not work with Doom Builder 2.0.1.1157, you'll either need a version from http://svn.drdteam.org/doombuilder2/ or compile it yourself!

To use the plugin just copy the .dll into your plugins folder. You'll also have to attach a hotkey to the mode under "Tools" (not the one under "Sectors", I'll have to remove that). Then just select a couple lines, press the hotkey and have fun.

Basically everything is done. The only big feature that's completely missing is selecting sectors (instead of lines) and use their lines for trimming.

What's not working so well:

• Right now the height modification can only be enabled or disabled for both floor and ceiling at the same time, but that's fail, so it'll be changed
  
• There's no check for the number of selected lines, but both auto curve and Catmull Rom splines need at least 2 lines, so you should not use those modes when you have only one line selected (Catmull Rom Spline mode will crash in that case)
  
• Auto curve between lines with angles > 180° doesn't work correctly
  
• Pressing the "X" to close the dialog will fuck it up, use the "Cancel" button (or "OK")
  
• Code needs to be cleaned up

[FireSeraphim]

Well it seems that someone has beat me to the punch. I was about to suggest an alternate method of switch actived rising stairs like the ones you see in doom1 and doom2 using nothing but ACS scripting.

[Gez]

This is an editor plugin to generate several sectors at once and has absolutely nothing to do with ACS.

Also while I'm here I'll mention that doombuilder.com seems back online.

[FireSeraphim]

I know, I know. but still it is food for thought. Maybe I should discuss my idea in another thread.

[boris]

It's still alive... new video.

Unfortunately YouTube somehow raped my beautiful 1080p video :(

[Reisal]

Likewise, cannot wait to actually use this, it will make stair building a ton easier!

[boris]

Still working on it...

Some more advanced stuff, showing off creating trims from sectors (instead of only lines) and the brand new prefab system.