SRB2 Level Editing Made Easy
Aligning Your Textures
In the glitch screenshot from the last section, repeated here for your
convenience:
...there's one more glitch that we actually can fix. Notice that you
can see three walls from where you are. But where the walls touch each
other, there are two squares of the same dark-brown colour! What we
need to do is realign the texture on the wall in the middle
(horizontally speaking) of the screenshot. If we could offset the left
of that texture by 64 units/pixels (the size of each square),
everything would be fixed.
In WadAuthor, right-click that wall's linedef, which happens to be this
one:
...and go to Properties. We'll be editing a sidedef. When we saw the
problem, we were standing in sector 1, and the linedef's little line
points to sector 1, so we want to edit the front sidedef. Notice these
two boxes in the sidedef frame:
The label abbreviates
X/Y Offsets,
but what it really means is
Horizontal/Vertical
Offsets, because this has nothing at all to do with X
coordinates or Y coordinates in the map editor. Set the first of the two
boxes to 64 (like I've already done in the screenshot). This will offset
the texture horizontally by 64 units, which is half of the texture, or
one of the coloured squares. Save and test the level:
Hey! There we go!
Notice, though, that the alignment still isn't
exactly correct. Between the first
and second walls from the left, there's still a slight misalignment. And
there are still several other places in the level where the alignment's
all wrong.
Here's some harsh reality for you: it's theoretically impossible in
most cases to get the alignment exactly correct. And getting it to be
passably close, even on small levels, is a
big fat stinking time-consuming
aggravating pain in the tush. Even Greenflower Zone, Act 1, as
distributed by STJr, has misaligned textures. All the official levels do.
My advice to you is to go on playing your misaligned levels. If you're
sure everything is completely done, and there's one particular
misalignment that's bugging you, and it's an easy fix like this one was,
and you still have some free time left over, then fix it. Otherwise,
leave everything as it is. Don't sweat the small stuff. Especially when
fixing the small stuff is as involved and tedious as proper texture
alignment is.
By the way, the second box under
"X/Y Ofs.," as you might expect, controls vertical offset. I've only
once ever had a use for it. If your ceiling heights and most of your
floor heights are in multiples of 128, you'll probably never need it.
You can't have all your floor heights be multiples of 128, unless you
use way too many springs, because the characters can't jump 128 units;
the maximum vertical jumping distance is about 96. (In fact, the next
section will be about jumping and other vertical distances.)
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I have been informed that some level editors have a feature to
automatically align textures. While it doesn't do a perfect job, it can
be a big help. WadAuthor is actually one such level editor, or at least
it seems to be; there's an Align Textures menu item somewhere. I haven't
figured out how to use it yet. SSNTails informs me that DeePsea has the
best automatic texture alignment of any editor he's tried it with.