Duck and Cover

Thought I would post a few of these little tricks I have learned.

1. Ladders only work from the two visible directions, going towards upper right and upper left. Ladders do not normally work going in the other direction. Remember, the character's back will always be towards you when they are climbing a ladder. This may mean that there is no animation of characters going up/down ladders from their front.

2. You can stack floor and/or roof tiles in a step pattern for a nice little "stepping stone" effect. There are various broken surface pieces that are prime tiles for this effect. Smaller than 6x6 tiles, such as caps, do not like to be walked on, and thus normally need the climbable effect added..

3. Ethereal Use A: You can make tiles ethereal that tend to block the character from climbing a ladder. Sometimes the very floor tile at the top of the ladder will bumb the character on the head, preventing the climb. Just make it ethereal and the character will climb just fine.

4. Ethereal Use B: You can also make tiles ethereal if you don't want the character to walk on them. This is good for ledges and other precarious places. Or even useful for those spots where the character could normally just barely squeeze through. Just make the floor ethereal and they won't be able to get by no matter how hard they try. Your terrain will still look good and you can block the player's passage without too much effort. This can often be a good safety measure if you don't want to test and see if the character can get through. Especially useful for preventing the passage of a female human, who can squeeze through any 1x1 area, the smallest space size there is.

5. Ethereal Use C: You can make a wall ethereal if you want it to be a passage to a secret area. Very effective and it looks cool to let a character squeeze through a hole in a fence, a vent, etc..

6. Upper terrain: You should make higher terrain a different type of tile than that which is on a lower level. Why? Well its difficult to tell where the floors sepereate due to a lack of shadows from certain directions. However this can be fixed with the addition of invisible purple and/or black tiles to produce an artificial shadow.

Feel free to comment and/or add on anything I might be mistaken on or forget to mention.

When trying to limit the amount of ammo/weapons available to the player without hanicaping the enemy it's best to use the entity editor to create a clone of the weapon/ammo and make it unlootable. Any normal items added to the npc's inventory and marked unlootable will become lootable if the npc equips them.

For example, you want the npc to have a decent weapon so that they have a chance against the player, but you don't want the player to gain such a weapon at that moment in the game. If you just add a weapon to the inventory and say that the amount is 1 and the amount non-lootable is 1, then when the npc equips the weapon it will become available to the player if he kills the npc.

Likewise if you want ammo to be limited for the player but plentiful for the npc you might give them 60 rounds 40 of which are non-lootable. Unfortunately if the clip of the weapon holds 30 rounds then if the npc is killed before all their ammo is used up then up to 50 rounds of ammo can be available to be looted.

On the otherhand if you make a clone of the weapon which is not lootable, then it can be equipped by the npc and will not be available to the player. Or if you make a non-lootable ammo type then you can give the npc virtually unlimited ammo, while making only a pitance available to the player.

Edit BTW sprites do have animations for climbing from all angles, I guess they limited the direction you can climb ladders to make things easier for the player and mapper. Climbing ladders where you can't see them, or adding a ladder to the back of something wouldn't be very easy so since the perspective is fixed they limited the direction of ladders.

That "enthereal walk into fence hole" idea's pretty cool, never thought of it.

If you want the player to be able to do it yet don't want to place tiles in front or back, just use a tile and mark it invisible so the player can't walkt through the whole tile...

Been a while I've mapped but that should work right?

Are there any suitable fence tiles to crawl under/squeeze through? The only two I can think of (generic wooden fence and generic Corrugated Wire Fences) don't really have that big enough gap.

Also you can make etheral floor tiles for entrances to secret areas, as JJ86 did in his Quartz map, along with a wall vent you could crawl through.

There is a fence piece in the Junkyard map. I can't remember which tileset it is from but it has a large enough hole that any small character should be able to fit through (I doubt a super mutant or deathclaw capable graphically, but whatever..).

As for squeezing through tiny places. I have limited this to only a female character. This makes the female humans have a larger role of sorts. A good way to hide stuff, particularly if you don't want to stump the player when they try to get to it with ther big buff male character "Hmm.. can't get there.. Must be a map bug" heh heh ;)