My First Age

[Rabbit]

Apologies in advance if I'm posting in the wrong topic heading, as I'm starting to flesh out my first Age and have a few basic questions. (please go gentle, I'm still a noob)

I have a building with two levels and I need a stairway between them. Using Blender, can I just use a sloping surface textured to look like stairs and is there a constraint on the angle I can use?

Can anyone give me any advice on creating the standard glow-button activated door?

In Kadish at the end of the pyrmid puzzle and you disappear down a elevator which is a hexagonal floor section, I would like maybe to put my own version of something like that in my Age. Any advice on how to recreate that?

I have a thousand other questions, but I'll leave it at that just for now....

Thankies....

[electroglyph]

I can answer the first one.

If you build a stair with a short rise of half a unit the avitar will step up onto it. Anything higher and he stubs his toe. This also applies to steps or rocks built on your terrain. A natural stride would be 1/2 unit rise for 1 unit of run.

The other solution and the one used in the ferry terminal grand stair is to build an invisible ramp above the steps so the avitar is not actually walking on the steps.

[Chacal]

It is the trick used in pretty much all the stairs. Don't make the stair model a collider, it is too complex and will slow down your Age. Always use an invisible ramp.

[Jojon]

What they said. :) It is perfectly reasonable to actually model all the visible stairsteps, though - they do not use that many polygons (unless you make it out of stretchmetal and actually fully model the mesh ;) and a slope with a starcase texture may not be very convincing, unless the camera is fixed.

For the rest of your questions (since nobody who actually knows has answered yet), animation happens to be the simplest bit out of it. I have not messed about a lot with any of it myself, but suggest that you read through the following articles in the wiki and then check out the .blend file for NanderB's little test age showcasing just those features:

* http://www.guildofwriters.com/wiki/How_ ... _Clickable

This uses a "quickscript" - pretty much an alcscript macro, with some presets. Some clues on what goes on behind the quickscript curtains can be gleaned from:

* http://www.guildofwriters.com/wiki/SittingMods

To have your door swing open, just animate its rotation in Blender and then add a bit of alcscript markup:

* http://www.guildofwriters.com/wiki/Animations

Your elevator will have to be part of a "subworld", explained right at the beginning of the tutorial on the subject:

http://www.guildofwriters.com/wiki/SubWorlds


And finally, the example age you might rip the guts out of :9:

* http://uruexploration.googlepages.com/A ... Door.blend