Railings for 3D floors?

[audiodef]

How do I create a railing for a 3D floor? For classic doom, you put in a grate-type middle texture and make it lower unpegged, but I see it's not that simple for 3D floors when using zdoom in hexen format, playing with gzdoom.

[ReX]

There are a couple of ways to make railings for 3D floors.

1. The simplest way is to use a texture such as MIDBARS3 on both the front and back sidedefs of the linedef you wish to use as a railing (very similar to the way in vanilla DooM). You'll need to make sure that both sidedefs are lower-unpegged and a y-offset value assigned so that the railing is at the proper height. Then you can use a Line_SetBlocking Special so that the railing allows players and enemies to pass below and fly above.

2. A slightly more involved way, but one that provides more realistic "physics" and blocking, is to manually create your railings with 3D constructs. The way I do it is to create a thin (usually no more than 4 units wide & tall) sector along the edge of your main 3D floor, and make it a 3D floor by itself. This forms the top of the railing (the horizontal part), and the top is typically no higher than 32 units above the top of your main 3D floor. Next, I create another 3D sector that is also 4*4, and extends from the bottom of my main 3D floor to the top or bottom of the 3D Railing (although you can play around with this sector's height). This sector forms the vertical bars of your railing. Then simply copy and paste this vertical sector to as many points along the horizontal bar as you need.

If you have played Paranoid for GZDooM, you'll see many examples of this type of railing use.

[audiodef]

I like #2. Thanks! And, I'll check out Paranoid.

[exl]

http://zdoom.org/wiki/Line_SetIdentification with the 3dMidtex flag is pretty intuitive. The solid parts of a texture on a line with Line_SetIdentification set will become a physical thing of sorts; you can walk on the top of the texture, and pass below it.

In UDMF this can be set as the "Walkable middle texture" line flag without using the Line_SetIdentification type.

[printz]

Speaking of 3d mid tex lines... there's a trick available: in order to make monsters walk on (3d) floors with gaps, create a new completely transparent texture, make it as short as needed vertically, and place 3dmidtex lines with this texture on the borders of the gaps, at the tops. Monsters will detect those invisible 3dmidtexes and walk by them, ignoring the fact they're walking over a ledge.