Efficient teleport boxes

Throughout my rather short time mapping (not even 1 year yet) I've gone through various types of off-map teleport architecture for teleporting in large bodies of monsters. Simple large boxes of 2 sectors, inverted flasks with long necks that funnel monsters in one at a time, then somewhere I found making teleport lines perpendicular to the line the monsters wander up against is more reliable than parallel, leading to this rather weird looking parallelogram box (pic was squished width-wise to fit better);



This double teleport funnels monsters down to the teleport lines (green dashes) with a spare strip in the middle separated by block monster lines (blue dashes). The red boxes are the teleport switch sectors, lowering 25 units to allow near-instant teleports when activated. And then the box with the cross in the middle is the merged sector allowing sound through - you can have the floor of the box raised so that no sound passes through the crossed sector to the monsters, which lowers when the switch sectors are lowered. This is useful for large slaughter maps where the fewer monsters active at a time can greatly reduce lag.

So, what interesting styles of teleport boxes do you guys use? If it isn't a secret only released by carefully looking at your maps in an editor? ;P

I've experimented a little bit with directional teleporters. Meaning, if you set up lines that face towards the different destinations on the map, the monsters can teleport close to you no matter what or effectively "follow" your location. It's fun :D

This is kind of a brute force method, but very effective when you want fast teleporting. The thin sectors with the green lines have ceiling down on floor, keeping the monsters in place. These "doors" also work as teleporting lines (remember to have lines pointing at both direction for best "performance"). You can also add extra teleport lines if the doors alone aren't enough. Merge the sector with whatever sector that wakes the monsters up. Just a few notes: Leave a little extra space in the teleport sector that the monsters can move around, and don't place the doors right over the monsters' center or they won't hear anything until the doors are opened (sometimes arch-viles can escape from the door if it's 8 units away from the monster, so use a smaller grid to move it closer to the avs' center). And finally, use insta-raising ceiling actions for the doors, or put them high enough that it's just one unit lower than the monsters' height.



edit: The "two boxes" where only the line between the sectors teleports is one of the worst possible methods, and for some unfathomable reason pretty popular (at least if Claus 2 maps were of any indication). Depending on the construction it can easily get stuck if the blocking sector is too small (if it gets occupied by a manc, nothing can cross the teleport line), and if it's too big everything goes to that sector without teleporting because the tele destination is blocked.

I use the "foolproof" scrolling teleporters in Essel's mapping tips thread, spacing monsters out with doors if I have multiple monsters in one passage. I'll use half-open doors which are set to the fastest opening speed. You can't use a conveyor control linedef much faster than 256 for this as the monsters can bunch up at the end repeating linedef. If I need rapid teleport of many monsters, I'll use multiple boxes and multiple teleport destinations.

If this is a confusing description, I can map it out :P

I dislike walky joined-sector teleports. They seem really inefficient and prone to possible failure, preventing 100% kills.

Super Jamie said:

I dislike walky joined-sector teleports. They seem really inefficient and prone to possible failure, preventing 100% kills.

This really depends on construction (see my edit about the "two box teleports"). If the sectors don't make congestion possible and have enough teleporting lines that there can't be single monsters left alone, there won't be any problems. Conveyor belt teleports are nice and effective, but in some cases their use is limited (and similarly walking teleports are limited if you want to teleport idle monsters). I'd say neither of the two types is superior, it really depends on what kind of a teleport you are creating from gameplay point of view. (and don't forget the different waking up behaviour in Boom and ZDoom that's important when making idle monster teleports)

Anyway, good point about the multiple destinations - those obviously speed up teleporting as well, even if the destinations are just next to each other. Just split up your teleport lines or add more of them (one for each destionation) and you're good to go.

I set these up so that the middle teleporter box will lower when the player enters the area I want to start spawning monsters in. I usually have multiple destinations for the boxes so this allows me to spawn whatever monsters I want in very specific areas. The boxes are small enough that almost all the boxes will empty within just a few seconds.

Brilliant design ArmouredBlood. I'm about 95% done with my first map ever, and making a design very much like this one solved 2 different issues, one with choppyness and one with nodes. Thanks!