| One Very QOOLE Tutorial | W A V E L E N G T H |
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| by AK-47 | March 4, 1999 |
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Welcome to the QOOLE 99 Tutorial - This tutorial is meant only to teach the basics of QOOLE 99, such as installation, setup, and rudimentary funtions including brush creation and texturing. I just want to clarify one thing first: I cannot offer QOOLE tech support or answer QOOLE specific questions! If you just have a question that has to do with editing in general, or with Worldcraft, you can e-mail either me or HB. But, if it has to do with QOOLE in particular, you probably won't have very much luck asking us :-) . You can e-mail the people at the QOOLE website concerning those questions. Make note that every action I want you to perform is colored blue. Without further ado, on to the tutorial!
First, point your browser over to QOOLE: Pursuit of Perfection (Q-PoP). Q-PoP is a site on gamedesign.net that is devoted to covering everything that's Qoole; no pun intended. Your best bet is to point your browser there to download the most recent veresion of QOOLE. Q-PoP is located at: http://qoole.gamedesign.net. Just download the most recent version, and you'll be on your way. Just for your information, the Qoole website is conveniently located at: http://www.qoole.com. But again, you can find all you need at Q-Pop. Once QOOLE's done downloading, install it to the directory of your choice. To run QOOLE, just open the folder you installed it to, and run Qoole99.exe. You should get a screen that looks like this image. First item on our list is to get QOOLE set up so we can start mapping. Click on the "Edit" menu, and select "Preferences". You can set all the options in the General, 2D, and 3D screens to your likings. You will probably want to set the "Default grid size" in the 2D dialog to 8. Unless you know what you're doing, you can leave all the options in the Render Library alone. In the Game Compile screen, click on the pulldown menu next to "Game" and select "Half-Life". All of the info in the "Map Compile Utilities" should be correct, but if you know that each of the compile programs are in a different directory, you can specify that directory here. In the box next to the word "Path" enter the path to hl.exe in your Half-Life directory. Alternatively, you can click "Browse" and find it through there. Click "OK". Now, open the "File" menu, and click "New". Under the "Game" pulldown menu, choose "Half-Life", and under the "Entity" pulldown menu, make sure "Half-Life Standard" is selected. Click "OK".
After clicking "OK", four windows should pop up in the main view to the right, and on the list to the left will be a small image that says "Lev" with the word "Untitled1" next to it. Most of the tool bar buttons at the top of the screen will have lit up as well. QOOLE should now look like this. The four windows to the right is where you'll actually be working with and viewing your level. The windows are arranged like this:
Top (XY) View |
3-d (Perspective) View |
Back (XZ) View |
Side (YZ) View |
To understand the axis-system in a 3-D world, try this simple experiment: Stand up tall and hold your arms down at your sides. Now, lift your arms straight out until they're level with your shoulders. Now, make your hands so that you're giving a "thumbs-up" symbol - But leave your arms where they are! Okay, if you've done all this correctly, here's how it works: you're standing up in the Z-axis. Your thumbs are also pointing up in the Z-axis. This is the axis that runs up and down (top to bottom). Your arms are pointing to your left and right, this is in the X-axis (think of it like east-to-west). Lastly, you're facing "north", with your back to the "south" in the Y-axis (think of it as north-to-south). So the main view is said to be the X-Y view because you can see changes in the X and Y axes; but not in the Z-axis.
The first tool we're going to mess with is brush creation. To create a new physical block, or 'brush', click the "Object" menu and open the "Add Brush" sub-menu. Then choose the "Cube (medium)" menu item. A wireframe cube should appear in the 3D view and in the three 2D windows. Lets say we want to change this cube into a room that the player can actually walk around in. It's much too small to do that now, so we have to resize it. To make the cube larger, we'll have to use the "scale" tool. First click on the "Mode" menu, and select "Object scale". (Alternatively, you can click on the "Object scale mode" button on the toolbar. It is the button that shows four arrows above a cube.) Next click on the cube we just made. It should change colors and there should be yellow blocks in the center of each side and in the corners. Click and hold the mouse button near the lower left corner of the cube in the top view and drag down and left until the cube lines up with the next thick grid lines. Now click the top center scale block in the front view, and drag up unti the top of the cube is aligned with the next thick grid lines. We've made the cube larger, but that's all it is: a solid cube. We need to hollow the cube out so that the player will have a room to run around in. To accomplish this, we use the "Hollow" tool. First make sure you are in "Object selection" mode, and then select the cube. Right click on the cube and select the "Edit" submenu. Finally, choose "Hollow inward". Leave the setting at 8. Our cube has now been seperated into 6 different blocks that make up the four walls, the ceiling, and the floor.
Now, let's mess around with the camera for a minute. There are four camera (reffered to as the "eye" in QOOLE) tools for us to use. First is the Eye move tool. (It's the button on the toolbar that shows an eye with a straight arrow above it.) Click on the "Eye move" tool. Now, if you hold down the left mouse button in the 3D view, you can move the eye up, down, left, or right, according to how you move the mouse. If you hold down the right mouse button, you can move the eye forward, back, left, or right. If you hold down the left mouse button in one of the 2D views, you can scroll the view by moving the mouse. If you hold down the right mouse button in the 2D views, you can zoom in and out by moving the mouse forward or back. Simple enough. The next tool is the Eye rotate tool. (This is the button that shows the eye with the circular arrow above it. When this is activated, you can hold down the left mouse button in the 3D view to rotate the eye around. That's all this tool does. Third is the Eye zoom tool. (The button shows a magnifying glass, of all things!) When this tool's running, both the left and right mouse button make the 3D or 2D views zoom in or out by moving the mouse forward or backwards. Last of all is the Fly Through tool, which, when clicked, switches the 3D view to complete mouse control. Moving the mouse around will make the 3D eye rotate, and holding the right mouse button will make the view "fly" forward. There are also three different 3D view modes. These affect how objects in the 3D view are shown. First is Wireframe render (the button with the wireframe cube on it). This shows all objects in the 3D view as wireframe polygons. Next is Solid render (the button showing a solid block with each side a different color). This shows every object in the 3D view as a solid. Last in Textured render (the button that shows the block with a desert scene on it). This shows every object as a solid with whatever texture is on it. (I'll get into textures in a minute.) Hopefully you have now mastered the art of manipulating the 3D eye!
Now, we are going to learn about texturing. In case you don't know, a texture is just the image that is on a brush to actually make it look like a wall, ceiling, floor, or whatever else you want. Without textures, EVERY object in the game would be a blank block. That would be pretty confusing! QOOLE has every texture from Half-Life loaded already. To see all the textures we can use, click the "Texture" button located at the bottom left of the screen. A "Loading textures" status bar should appear, and when it's done you should have a list of textures at the left of the screen. QOOLE automatically groups textures that are related, and all of the groups are shown in the pull-down menu just above the texture list. Right now that menu should say "c1". You can peruse through all the groups so that you can get an idea of what textures they all contain. The menu next to the texture group menu is the "Scale" menu. It just changes how large each image is shown in the list. It has no affect on the textures in the game. Now, lets say we wanted to texture our comfy little room.
Click on the "Texture render" eye tool. You should now see our cube in all of it's textured glory. It's covered in a drab concrete texture. BORING! Let's spice it up some.
Make sure you are in "Object select" mode, then select the block in one of the 2D views. In the area above the texture list, it should display a picture of, the name of, and the size of the texture that is currently covering our cube. It's name is c1a0_w2, and it has a measurement of 96x96. Now, lets change which texture is on our cube. Open the texture group menu, and choose the "Fifties" group. Make sure the cube is still selected, and then find the texture named
"-0fifties_w12". Double click on that texture. Voila! We now have a cube that is covered in a slightly more attractive texture. In case you're wondering if you've done everything correctly so far, look at this image.
This is good texturing... if you want your room to look monotonous as possible. Now we'll learn to select and apply textures to each seperate brush that make up the cube. This lets you select which texture you want to go on which side of the cube, instead of covering the whole thing with the same texure. Lets say we wanted to change the ceiling so that it looked like an office building. First we'd have to ungroup all of the brushes that make up our cube so that we can select each one seperately. Select our cube. Open the "Object menu", and select "Ungroup objs". There's no visual change that we did anything to our cube, but now try selecting only the ceiling in the 3D view. You'll notice in the 2D views that only the ceiling of the cube is selected. Now, go ahead and double click on the texture we have selected. Only the ceiling's textures should change. You may notice that the textures get pretty weird where the ceiling and the walls meet, but this is OK. You won't notice this in the game. Now, here's a little exercise for you to perform: try applying the the texture "fifties_flr01" to the floor of our cube, and apply the texture "fifties_w13" to each wall of our cube. Tip: Try using the eye (camera) tools to fly the camera inside the cube. This gives you a much better vantage point when you are applying textures to the individual brushes. Hopefully all goes well and you end up with something that looks like this. If you didn't, try reading over this paragraph again and see if you can find what you did wrong. If you did end up with that image, congratulations! You have mastered basic texturing!
Well, we now have a textured room to call our very own... the only problem is, there's no way for people to walk around in it! This is where we get into entities. We're going to need to add a Player start point to our room to tell Half-Life where the player will appear when the level starts. The entity name for the player start point is info_player_start. Click on the "Object" menu, and open the "Add Entity" sub-menu. Now, go to the "Player" sub-menu, and select "Start". (To make things easier on people new to mapping, QOOLE has you select entities that way, instead of choosing the actual entity names as is common in other editors such as Worldcraft.) A little blue box should appear in the center of our room. This box represents where the player start is. Make sure you are in "Object select" mode, and select the player start box. Switch to "Object move" mode, and move the player start in the top 2D view so that it is in the lower-right corner of the room. Leave ALOT of space between it and the walls, though. Then move it in the side 2D view so that it has plenty of space between it and the floor. (About a quarter up the room.). Our player start is now set and ready to go! There's still one problem with our room: there is no light! If we were to play now, we'd be stumbling around in pitch black. So, lets put in a light entity. Open the "Object" menu, then select "Add Entity", then "Light", and "Light" again. Another blue box should appear. This is our light. Place it right in the center of the room using the top and side 2D views. We're going to have to edit the properties of our light so that we can change how bright it is. Select our light, and right click on it. Select "Properties". Under the "Entity" tab, it shows all of the different KEYs for the "light" entity. The only one we have to worry about is the "_light" KEY. Click on the value for the "_light" KEY, and add the number 150 at the end. This KEY works so that the first 3 numbers are the Red, Green, and Blue light values, and the last number is the intensity. Your screen should look something like this right now.
We now have a finished room! How exciting! Now, in order for us to play inside our level in Half-Life, we must compile our map. Right now our map is in .qle format (this format is exclusive to QOOLE). Compiling turns the map into .bsp format which Half-Life recognizes. QOOLE can not open .bsp files. So, let's compile! Save your map by clicking the button with the disk on it. Save it as whatever you want. Now, click on the "Compile map" button (the button with the letter C and the arrow on it). Check the boxes so that it runs all of the utilities (including Half-Life), but leave the "Parameters" box alone. Now, click "OK". A new window should pop up at the bottom of the screen showing the compile process. When it's done, Half-Life will open and run your map. If all went well, then you have a wonderful little room for your player to bounce around in! Too cool! Hopefully you found this tutorial to be educational, and you didn't run into any major snags on the way. As I stated before, if you have a problem that is directly related to QOOLE, I am not the person to ask. Contact the wonderful people over at the QOOLE website. However, if you had a problem with the tutorial, or something confused or misled you, please tell me so that I can clarify everything for you. Thanks for taking the time to read this, and hopefully you now have grasped a basic understanding of the QOOLE editor! Of course, you can always email me with quesions, comments, or constructive criticism! AK-47's e-mail address is ak47wavelength@hotmail.com
Half-Life, and the Half-Life logo are
trademarks of Valve Software and Sierra Online, used with permission. All screenshots and
drawings of Half-Life are (c) copyright Valve Software, 1998. All rights reserved. All
original content (text and art) are (c) copyright Wavelength, 1998, and may not be
reproduced without permission.