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Tutorials: Mapping: Building your First Vampire Map

by Kiramin

Your first map should be simple. Let's say, a large square room. Yes, it's boring but you need to get familiar with creating and manipulating brushes before you try to make something harder. Open the File menu and select New Map. If you still had Embrace open from the last tutorial, it may ask you things like "Do you wish to save?" or "Copy current selection?". Hit NO for both of them. First thing, save the map as something like "tutorial" (Note: Do not put spaces in your map name! If you do, it will not run properly). This way Embrace has a name to autosave it under. You should also remember to save regularly.

Creating and Manipulating Brushes

Now to create a brush. You may remember how to do this from Part 1. If not, all you need to do is place the mouse cursor over the 2D Window, hold down the left mouse button, and drag a box. That box becomes your brush. It is drawn as a red-dotted line because you currently have it selected. Deselected it by SHIFT + Left-Clicking on it, or by hitting ESCAPE to deselect all brushes. Now reselected it by SHIFT + Left-Clicking on it again. Now, hit BACKSPACE. Hey! Why did you just delete your brush? Because I wanted to show you how, just in case you want to sometime in the near future. Go ahead and make a new brush.

We need to make this brush into a room. To begin this process, you must move and resize the brush in order to make it the size you would like your room. You can move a selected brush by placing the mouse cursor inside of the brush and holding down the left mouse button. Now you can move the brush by moving your mouse. To resize a brush, you place the mouse cursor outside of the brush and hold down the left mouse button. If the cursor is to the left of the brush, you will move the left side. If it is above the brush, you will move the top side. If it is to the top and to the left of the brush, you will move the top-left corner. Experiment with resizing your brush by placing the mouse cursor at different points around the outside.

Here is a table of the controls we just covered:

So you know, many of the above actions can be performed on multiple brushes at once (if there are multiple brushes selected). BACKSPACE deletes all selected brushes, and moving/resizing applies to all selected brushes. Resizing multiple brushes can get a bit tricky, so I recommend only resizing brushes one at a time for now.

Use what you have learned to make the brush at least 512 x 512 units (use the numbers along the edge of the grid to measure distance) or 8 x 8 large grid-squares. The players are usually about 128 tall, so 512 x 512 room could fit 4 people laying in a line on the floor. Now you need to give the brush height so your players have room to stand! You can do this either by switching to one of the side views (CTRL-TAB or ), OR you can do it in the Z-height window. You can move and resize brushes in the Z-height window the same was you do in the 2D window. Make your brush at least 256 units (4 large grid-squares) high. (Note: Be sure that brush contains the point (0,0,0). This is the point where the two grid lines labeled zero meet, and the elevation marked zero in the Z-height window. This is important because your character will spawn at that point, and you want him to be inside the room!

2. Using the "Make Hollow" Function to Build a Room

Don't look so smug. You haven't even made a room yet. Currently, you only have a single brush, which is a giant solid block floating in the middle of nothingness. To make it a room, you must simply click the "Make Hollow" button. This breaks a single brush up into mutliple brushes to form the floor, walls, and ceiling. Each of these new brushes are the thickness of a small grid-square.

3. Loading and Applying Textures

Go ahead and move your camera around inside of your new room to get a good look. You should notice that the entire place is covered in a really ugly purple and pink checkers pattern. Don't worry, that isn't permanent. You see, every surface on a brush is assigned a texture (an image file) that is "painted" on it in the game. Textures are how you make your brushes look like brick, dirt, grass, etc. Before you can assign any textures to your brushes, you must load them. To load a set of textures, open the Textures menu and selected one of the texture sets at the bottom of the menu. Go ahead and pick the textures from your favorite area in the game.

After you have loaded the textures, hit T. This will bring up the Textures Window. You can move through the textures by (once again) holding down the right mouse button and moving the mouse up and down. Find a texture you like, and click on it. That textures should then be applied to all your selected brushes. If you like, you can select the brushes one at a time (or in smaller groups) to assign them different textures.

4. Adding a Light

Your level will be pitch back unless you add a light. You do this by right clicking anywhere in the 2D window. It will bring up a long list. Select light. Position the light somewhere within your room. You can make multiple lights using the same method. At another time, I will go in to how to change the properties of your lights.

5. Adding a Sector

Sectors are used to tell the game what can be seen from where. Everything you want the character to be able to see MUST be contained in a sector. You could just place a giant sector around your entire level, but it is better to break it up in to smaller sections. The section covering sectors in the Embrace manual does an excellent job at explaining them. Also, I will talk more about sectors in Part 3.

For now, you just need to create a sector around your room. Do this by right-clicking in the 2D window and selecting sector. Resize the sector as you would a brush so that it contains all of your room. Be sure to resize it in the Z-height window so it extends both above and below your room as well.

6. Making the Floor Walkable

You might have noticed that there are some places in Vampire you can not walk. That is because they have not been made walkable. The floor of your room is currently not walkable. To change this, select ONLY the floor brush, and hit S. This brings up the Surface Inspector. This allows you to set the properties of the surfaces of your brush. You should see a box labeled "walk." Check it and hit OK. Be warned, if you change the texture on a brush it will reset all of the flags! This means that you will have to recheck the walk box.

6. Exporting and Running Your Map

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