How do I make a swinging door?

If you haven't made a basic door yet, please review "How do I make a basic door?" Repeat steps one through four of that section to start with. This will give you the three sectors used in all of these door examples.

An important note about swinging doors:

• The door must "swing" withing one sector. The door, in swinging, cannot cross into a different sector than from where it started swinging. The BUILD engine does not support this and you will get poor results.

Let's Go!

1. After repeating steps one through four of "How do I make a basic door?", your 2D map should look like this

2. The middle sector is where we'll place our swinging door so we need to make this sector big enough to accommodate the entire door.

3. Change to a smaller grid scale and draw a thin rectangle near the bottom of the middle sector. Place the cursor inside the new sector and press ALT-S to create an inner sector (not ALT-Insert like the Build docs say!). This will be the actual swinging door.

4. Now I've gone into 3D mode and started raising the floor of the small sector we just added. I know the door doesn't look wide enough -- we'll get to that later.

5. I've selected a suitable door texture and sized it to fit on the wall

6. Now go into 2D mode and place a SE sprite one the left side of the door with the 'S' key. If the sprite is not a sector effector, go into 3D mode and make it an SE sprite. This SE sprite will be the pivot point for the door. Set up the following tags:

• Sector effector HITAG=3. This is a random number picked by you. It must not be used anywhere else on the map as a connector for other things (such as other swinging doors or switches).
  
• Sector effector LOTAG=11 (Rotate sector door)
  
• Sector LOTAG of 23 (Swing door)
  

All Done! Save the map and go run it. Walk up to the door and hit the space bar (or whatever key you use to open doors). If the door doesn't swing open, review the steps above and make sure you did everything right.

The door is a bit wide, isn't it. You can go back into BUILD and make the door a little wider to leave less space around the edge of the door, but be careful! If the door is too wide and swings past the edge of the sector, you will get undesireable results. Also, try changing the placement of the sector effector. If you make the SE point down, the door will swing towards you when opened instead of away from you. But, remember, don't design the door so it will cross a sector when swinging. As our map is right now, changing the SE sprite to point down would give us a wierd door (try it and see!). You'll also notice that if you place the SE sprite too close to one side or the other, the door may swing "into" the wall and disappear when it's opened! If it ever happens to you, you'll know what I mean!

What? No sound? You'll need to add a sprite for sound. Throw a MUSICANDSFX sprite into the swinging door sector and see the Build docs for more information on the values for that sprite.

Download this map: door2.zip

This page will change as warranted by your comments, so please let me know if this helped you!