vertical transitions

by **titus** Thu Feb 23, 2012 3:30 pm

i've noticed there are a number of places in-game where the transitions are vertical, such as you'd see at the mouth of a cave entrance or a doorway, but the magic thing about it is there's just the trans -- no cave entrance, no doorway, etc. i seem to recall reading about a technique a while back on the bioware builders' forum where you create the doorway by building a doorway w/trans, then somehow get rid of the doorway part, leaving the trans. is this how these were done? i'd love to know how to do that, it's really cool.

by **The Amethyst Dragon** Thu Feb 23, 2012 4:48 pm

First, I'll come right out and say those few such transitions were an experiment.

Second, they're time-consuming, so aren't really good for large-scale use.

Third, I've only really done it with the rural tileset, which has the best possible tiles I needed.

Ok, here's the process:

1. Lay down a short line of trees in a rural area. Run a road into the trees to make the toolset make a "RuralExit" door tile.

2. In the left-panel of the toolset, go to the doors for your area and find the one you just made.

3. Right-click on the door and pick "adjust location" (you can't do this in the main view part of the toolset). Punch in numbers to move the door out from it's initial location.

4. Delete the trees/road tile. The door will remain behind now.

5. Put a waypoint in the exact location you want the door to end up. Use "adjust location" on the waypoint to get it's X, Y, Z, and direction/facing numbers.

6. Use the numbers from the waypoint to adjust the location of the door transition (again, using the left side panel). Delete the waypoint when you don't need it anymore.

7. Edit the door's properties like a regular door to change it's tag and set up the transition.

That's it. It used to be even more time consuming before I thought of using a waypoint to get the desired ending location. I hadn't heard of anyone doing that before, just complaints about it taking forever to do incremental location adjustments to move a door into place. The waypoint just let's you get the exact location faster.