Flag Maps

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Note under construction

This tutorial is intended to teach you how to make the flag style maps as seen in escort and district.

1. To start off you should build the area you would like the battle to take place in. Here's mine in 3D wireframe its very simple for the sake of this tutorial.

2. You must then plan where the capture flags will be. (blue is Brenodi, grey is neutral and red is NF)After doing this you must number each flag. 1 must always be the first Northen Faction flag and the highest number must always be the first Brenodi flag.

(notice that 4 is the highest number brenodi starts here and that 1 is the lowest number NF starts here)

3. Next you will want to place these flags on your map. To do this first you will need to go to entities on the righthand side of hammer and select 'emp_resource_point_prop' and place it on your map in the 3D view.

4. For my map i need 4 flags as shown in my plan so before i shift+drag the first 'emp_cap_model' i made 3 times i will set it up properly. Bring up the object properties of 'emp_cap_model' the only things that are not set up by default are the Brenodi and NF models. For this tutorial we will just use the flag pole models. So make northen faction model 'models/common/props_system/flagpole01_nf.mdl' And the brenodi model 'models/common/props_system/flagpole01_imp.mdl' Leave everything else the same for the time being.

5. The next step is to shift+drag the 'emp_cap_model' so for my map i need to do this 3 times. The below image is a 2D wireframe view. All the purple boxes are flags.

6. You must now number your flags by bringing up the object properties of each individual 'emp_cap_model' and changing number of the parent capture point. (remember-1 is always NF, highest number is always brenodi)

7. Now you are ready to create the 'emp_cap_point' this is a brush based entity which activates when a player steps into it. So first you need to click the block tool, drag a box around the area that a player can capture a point. (mine will be just bigger than the flag)You must then change the texture of this modle to 'nodraw'. This texture does exactly what it says on the tin - it creates a object which is not drawn.

8. You must now change this brush into a entity. To do this simply click on the brush and then with your keyboard press 'ctrl+t'. This will have brought up the object properties menu. Change the class to a 'emp_cap_point'

9. Now that we have a capture point we need to make it comunicate with the correct flag. To do this make sure the properties menu is up and change the 'number of this capture point' to the flag you want it to capture. You can have more that one capture point per flag but you must set them up the same (i think)

10. There are lots of settings that you may wish to change on the capture point propertys bu ill let you work them out as each one is individual for most flags.

11. Now onto spawn points. When a flag is captured on most maps you will want that team to be able to spawn at a nearer flag. To do this we need a entity called 'emp_info_player' these are simular to info_player_start used in halflife2 except there is one for each team in empires. Brenodi has 'emp_info_player_imp' and NF has 'emp_info_player_nf' so its easy to tell them apart. For starting spawn points which are already captured you will need place a 'emp_info_player' double click it and change the number of the parent capture point to its corisponding flag.

12. Dont forget that as this spawn will be there at the start of the game you will need to change 'enabled?' to yes.

13. Now im going to show you how to set up the spawns for the neutral flags. For these, each flag will need spawns for each team rather than just one. Take a look at the picture below. Both of thoses spawn points are for the same flag its just that one team is traveling in one direction and the other in the oppersite. So when placing spawns bare in mind which direction the teams are traveling.

14. For these spawn points you need to make sure that you have 'enabled?' set to no

15. Now for the ammo and health boxes these are set up in a simular way to the spawn points. These is a different entity for each team.

Brenodi 'emp_imp_ammo_crate' for the ammo box and 'emp_imp_health_crate' for the health box

NF 'emp_nf_ammo_crate' for the ammo box and 'emp_nf_health_crate' for the health box

16. If the ammo crates and health crates are linked with a flag you will have to set them up the the corisponding flag. If they are just on the map and do not have anything to do with a flag you will need to set the flag number to 0.