SRB2 Level Editing Made Easy

A Cool Bonus for Thok-Barriering

Let's convert our level into an open-air level, so instead of walls all over the place, we can watch the clouds in that beautiful Greenflower Zone sky. Now that we have a thok-barrier, it's easy to do this! Edit the properties of the thok barrier sectors so they both have F_SKY1 as a ceiling image. Don't change the floor images or the heights. Save and play your level:



Isn't that nice? Finally some sky! Notice that the walls we still do see are 128 units high (two squares if you judge by the GFZROCK texture; each square is 64x64 units). That's because our thok barriers have floor/ceiling heights of 128 units. This effect only works with the special F_SKY1 as the ceiling for the thok barrier, not any other flat.

The downside to open-air levels is that you can actually see the layout of the thok barrier:



For this reason, you might want to edit the thok barrier's linedefs and make it more "airtight," so to speak. It would look nicer that way. Also notice this glitch elsewhere in the level:



That's because I used two sectors for the thok barrier instead of one, and this particular spot on the thok barrier is where they are joined. The only way around this without possibly ruining your level and definitely making yourself insane is to start off the level with a huge square and build everything inside of it. If WadAuthor didn't suck so much, there would be another way. I'm sure if we were using DCK, it would be no problem to fix this glitch.

In any case, you can't fix this level. Not easily, anyway; not without Editing Raw Data of linedefs to change which sector they belong to, and WadAuthor loves to ruin your levels when you do that. (If you decide to try it, make a backup first!)

But when you make a new level from scratch, remember to make a huge square for the thok barrier first, before making anything else. Then create everything inside the huge square. (Somewhere from 1024x1024 to 8192x8192 is a good starting size for the huge square, depending on how big of a level you intend to make.)