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Level Building

Setting Up Radiant

Follow the steps below to set up GTK Radiant for editing Blob And Conquer

  1. Install GTK Radiant (we recommend 1.4)
  2. Unarchive Blob and Conquer to any location in your home directory
  3. Edit the file blobAndConquer.game (in the scripts directory of Blob and Conquer) and do the following,
  4. Copy blobAndConquer.game to /path-to-radiant/games/
  5. Run radiant and select Blob and Conquer

If you experience problems check your paths and settings in the blobAndConquer.game file

Creating Levels

Creating levels requires knowledge of using GTKRadiant. Teaching the use of Radiant is beyond the scope of this manual, however there are plenty of tutorial floating around on the internet. Things to remember - You are not making a Quake level, so Quake features are not supported - Things like jump pads, crushers, etc are not supported in Blob and Conquer.

At the very least when creating a level you will need an info_player_start somewhere in your map so that the player can start somewhere. You should also have a FEATURE_EXIT somewhere so that the player can finish the level. By default exits will return to the title screen. A grid size of 8 is recommended when editting levels. For scale size, Bob is 6 x 6 x 6 (so he's not all that big).

Shaders

Blob and Conquer does not support the Quake 3 shader language.

Compiling Levels

It is recommended you use the supplied shell scripts to compile your levels. This will ensure that Radiant builds the level correctly. The script are found in the scripts directory of the Blob and Conquer source. You will need to edit the scripts' variable so they reflect the path you have installed Blob and Conquer in your home directory (or whereever else you may have put it). There are two main scripts,

buildBSP.shFully builds the BSP. May time a long time depending on how big your map is.
leakCheck.shPerforms a very fast meta build of the BSP to test for leaks. We found this useful ourselves.

Running Levels

Before you can use a level you have to create a mission file. At it's very basic level a mission file contains the name of the BSP map file to use. A basic mission file looks like this,

Mission {

	bsp = data/bsp/somemap.bsp;
	
	music = music/Dark Club.s3m;

};

Once this file is created add it to the data/missions/ directory. You can then play the map by using the command,

./blobAndConquer -mission <name of your mission>

For additional command line options see the Command Line options section

Editting Mission and Entity Meta Data

Mission

bspPath to the BSP file to load.
musicMusic to load. Must be OGG, XM, S3M or MOD format.
localeFilePath to locale file for this map.
enemySpawnListPipe (|) seperated list of enemies that can be spawned in.
spawnSizeMaximum number of enemies to spawn in (will pick a random number between 1 and spawnSize)
minSpawnTimeMinimum spawn interval in 100ths of a second.
maxSpawnTimeMaximum spawn interval in 100ths of a second.

Objectives and Triggers

Todo

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