Sepelio's Mapping Tutorial

Introduction

Hello and welcome to Sepelio's netradiant mapping tutorial. This will hopefully help you get to grips with the basics of netradiant and then the more advanced stuff as I add to it. I highly recommend just playing around with buttons and opening other mappers .map files to see how things are done.

Video Tutorial

For those of you that are less inclined to reading I have also prepared a video tutorial:

The Videos

The Links

YouTube links: Part 1 Part 2

Image and Text Tutorial

Anyway, when starting netradiant you will be confronted first with a little box titled "global preferences". It should be set for nexuiz or xonotic. Just click ok.

Now the main screen pops up. In the image below I have labelled it with numbers.

1)This is the main area where you will create things and see where your brushes are sitting in 2d. You can change this view to see them in different perspectives which is rather useful (view -> orthographic). 2)This is the 3d preview. As you place brushes you will be able to see how they look in game to an extent. I find it useful for texturing. If you right click on the window you can look around and use they keypad arrows to navigate. Right click again to disengage. 3)This split window shows you textures. Its a simple list that shows the name of the texture set in the left hand box, then in the right hand one you can see a preview and can select a texture to use.

For the moment, we are going to draw a simple square box in the area marked 1 in the screenshot. Simply drag a box with the mouse so you end upwith something like this:

Wasn't that easy. If you move around in the 3d preview you should be able to see it.

Now press escape to deselect your box. Draw a second box next to it. Press escape again. Now nothing should be selected.

To select both boxes you can either hold shift and drag a box around both, or hold shift and individually click on each. Select both boxes. Now deselect one box by holding shift and clicking on it. Next delete the one selected box by pressing backspace.

You have just learned the basic keyboard commands!

Escape to deselect Shift + left mouse to select Backspace to delete To move a box, simply select it first then click on its middle and drag. To resize a box, select it then click and drag outside its area.

Resize the current box in the current view to look like this:

Now go up to the top bar and click view -> orthographic -> YZ. The view will change. Now we are viewing the box from a different perspective which will look something like:

Again, resize the box so it looks something like this: Ok so now we have one wall.Its not good for much just sitting there. We are going to have to make the other 3 walls, a floor and a ceiling.

Firstly, turn back to the 'top down' view by clicking view -> orthographic -> XY. Now select your wall. Go to the top bar and edit -> copy. Then go back to edit and click paste. You now have two walls. When you paste something it pastes directly ontop of what you copied it from. Simply click and drag the second wall off the first so it looks like this:

Now with your second wall selected go up to the bar full of icons that I showed you earlier. Click the one that looks like this:

This will rotate your selected wall 90 degrees in the Z plane. Now your boxes should look like:

Now you want to finish your walls. This is easy, all you have to do is copy, paste and move them appropriately to form a square. You should end up with something like this:

If you want to change the size of your box you can just resize each wall. Make sure they stay flush with each others edges though or corner to corner!

Ok so now we have our walls. Next we need to make our floor and ceiling. Once again, change the view. View -> orthographic -> YZ. Now draw a floor and ceiling in and position them to be flush with the rest of your room like so:

Now switch back to the XY view. Hopefully your floor and ceiling will be nice, flush and the same size as the rest of your room. But, they might not be. Dont panic however, just have a look at the different views to make sure they are lined up. Resize as needed and you should end up with this:

Here in the 3d preview you can see we are looking at the inside of the box. Its quite drab and has that nasty blue/black texture. Cant have that now can we?

Now go down to the panel on the bottom right that is used for texturing. Scroll down until you find e8. Click the little arrow next to it and it expands. Then double click e8 base.On the right you will see the e8 base textures loading into the preview. It should look like:

Now select the e8_base1 texture. In the 3d preview hold down ctrl + shift and then middle click on a wall. Tada! You have just put the texture onto the surface.

You can also select the entire wall by shift + click and then click on the texture to texture all the surfaces of that wall. Now texture each wall. Then pick a different texture and do the floor and ceiling. Mine turned out like this:

So we now have a small, dark, textured box. Sort of pointless if we cant see it right? We are going to need light and we cant start a fire (yet).

Now, right click in the middle of your room. A little menu pops up. This menu has a list of placeables or "entities". Click on the one that says light. A box pops up asking for the light intensity, enter 300 and click ok. Now we need to reposition your light so that it sits roughly in the middle of the room. This can be done with the translate tool:

Translate lets you move entities and brushes along just a single axis. Its much more precise than just clicking and dragging.

Select your light entity, then click translate. Arrows appear around the object that you are planning to move. Just click on an arrow and drag and the object moves in that single direction. You can do this in the 2d or 3d view. Easy. It will end up something like this:

Ok so now we have light, textures and a nice cosy room. There are a few more things we will need though. There is one more entity we have to place which is a player spawn point.

Do the same as before, right click inside your room in the 2d view but this time go to info -> info_player_deathmatch. A green box will appear. This is a deathmatch spawnpoint and is where you will start when you load your level into the game.

Use the translate tool to position the spawn point so it is near the ground. You should end up with this:

If you like, you can also place a weapon or two in the same manner. Right click -> weapon -> weapon_whatever. Same with items. Just make sure they are not taking up the same space as any other objects.

Now, we have a map we can actually play! Only thing left to do is compile it. Firstly save the map as map_tutorial. Now go to the top bar, then build. You will see a list of different options. We will go for (final) Long Distance Lighting.

This will take a little while depending on how good your computer is. Anyway, once it finished start up nexuiz/xonotic. Bring down the console by pressing ` (key below escape) and then type in "map map_tutorial" and press enter. Now your map should load and you can explore your brand new room! Mine looks like this: