Question about masked room-over-room trick...

[Salty]

In the Duke 3D atomic edition levels, there are levels that have a room over a room where you could see the entrance to both rooms at the same time, but the graphical glitch that usually occurs is avoided because the entrace to one of the rooms is masked with some texture. Examples of this that I remember are the secret room over the drive-thru in Duke Burger, and the mail conveyor-belt tubes in Going Postal.

My question is, how can I do that? I've tried to do it, but even with the entrance to the "above" room masked, that graphical, refresh-problem-like glitch occurs. Does it have something to do with what order you create and connect the rooms, or is this some undocumented feature of build? I've actually wondered about this for a LONG time, so any clarification would be greatly appreciated.


Thanks!

[Ding Bat]

One way you can do room over room with getting the video problem is to use sprites to make the second floor.

[Salty]

True, and that works great in some situations, but it has a few limitations. Since the second floor's "floor" would be made of sprites, you can't give it any sector attributes or any sort of sector-made furniture. Like in "Going Postal" (E4L6), they couldn't have done the conveyor belt tubes with just sprites, because they can't give sprites a conveyor belt SE. Also, there's something that I like about using floor over floor, it just feels more...I dunno, meaty and real, or something, and there's the added fact that if you're on a sprite-made floor, and someone shoots an RPG at your floor from below, you'll get damaged, which wouldn't happen with sector based floor-over-floor.

The reason why I suddenly really want to know about this trick is because years back I made a Duke level of my house (which is two stories) and I simply used a teleporter where stairs were to simulate multiple floors. It has always been an okay solution, but it feels cheap. I figure that if I actually built it all with floor-over-floor, I could mask the windows of the second floor rooms that conflict with the first floor (since there'd be the video problem where I can see in both rooms at the same time).

[Boinky]

Hrm.. Yes I can see where some of those issues could be quiet annoying.. But the SoS you want to see isnt fully possible w/ duke.. Most tricks are just buggy exploits of the engine.. There are some ways to make effective SOS, for example Cranium.map uses water that you can see through. Its a nice trick, but can be very buggy(I tried to replicate it. Did it, but it was very very buggy). If you have the patience to do sprite based SoS it can come out very nice.. Here is an example I did a few months ago when I was messing w/ build.. I never got around to finishing the map, but here is a SS of a sprite built floor.

http://bellsouthpwp.net/t/r/tramelj1/sos.jpg

Feel free to turn this into a link if you believe it to be too big!

[Little Conqueror]

One thing that I found thaf works? Make a separate sector right where the masked wall will be that isn't overlapping with either of the other sectors. If you need me to, I'll make an example.

[Ding Bat]

Salty said:
you can't give it any sector attributes or any sort of sector-made furniture.



Ahh, but i made a single room map with nothing but furniture in it. Living room chairs and or sofas of different sizes, three typyes of restaurant type chairs, office desks and office type club chairs.
The restaurant type chairs made in the 8 different positions of the compass.
All you hve to do is copy and paste into your own map.

Take a look.

[Little Conqueror]

The problem with that is, you can't do slopes, texture alignment, or anything like that.

[Salty]

Boinky, that's some pretty good SOS with sprites, and I realize that that's actually the only way to have floor/ceiling windows, like the one in your screenshot. Very neat stuff.

Ding Bat, thanks for providing that map, it's cool, too. I actually never seriously considered sprite-made furniture because I thought, for some reason, that they didn't stop weapon shots, such as the RPG. A lot of times, sprite-made furniture is probably more realistic than sector-made furniture, so I think I'll consider sprite-made furniture more often now.

Little Conqueror, I'm not sure I entirely understand what you're suggesting. Is it different than the way it's implemented in Duke Burger and Going Postal? If it's not too much trouble, I would really appreciate it if you made an example map like you said. Thank you!

[Roger]

Would be nice if Jonof carried over the room-over-room from SW into Duke and marked off a sector effector tag for it.