SRB2 Level Editing Made Easy
Manipulating the Grid
In our examples, the grid points — those blue dots everywhere — had
been 64 units apart. While that's the default, it can be changed.
Right-click an empty area in the map (hey, this time it actually does
matter!) and select "Increase Grid":
The blue dots are in the same place. Allow me to let you in on a little
secret: it's actually the dark blue lines, not the blue dots, that make
up the grid. Those lines! Did you even notice them? Well, if you look
carefully, you'll see they're twice as far apart as they used to be. Try
dragging a vertex around and then putting it back — it skips every other
blue dot.
You'll rarely, if ever, want to increase the grid like this. 64-unit
grids work fine most of the time. Sometimes, though, you need to work
with small areas and want the grid units to be closer together — say,
only 32 units apart from each other.
Right-click in an empty area and choose "Decrease Grid." Then do it
again:
Now there are twice as many blue lines. Try dragging a vertex and see
that you have finer control over where it lands.
For even finer control, you can disable the grid entirely. I recommend
that you only do this when you really need to. Right-click an empty area
and uncheck "Snap To Grid":
I won't give a demonstration this time, since it's very uncommon to
need to disable snapping to grid. So turn "Snap To Grid" back on and set
the grid units back to the default of 64 (both of which you should now
know how to do on your own) and keep reading.
This last tip, though it doesn't really have to do with the grid,
definitely belongs here. For the ultimate in fine control, right-click a
vertex and choose Edit Raw Data:
Now you can set the X and Y coordinates of the vertex exactly. (They
have to be integers — that is, numbers with no decimal point. 5 and
-1000 are okay, but -1.4 and 3.14159 aren't.) You can also do this with
things, a type of object I'm going to explain later.