The following is not my work.
It was written by Peewee_RotA whos last know email addy was [url]cabbruzz@gmail.com[/url]
and can be found at:
http://www.zeliepa.com/dna/blood2/index.htmBlood 2: Maps
Getting Started
Instlling Dedit for games made under the lithtech engine is frustrating. Sadly you absolutely have to be told how to start. There's no way to learn it on your own.
The first thing you need to do is updated to the latest blood 2 patch. They are found at
http://www.the-chosen.com. After this you need to install your blood 2 tool kit which can be found at the same place. Make sure to install both blood 2 and the blood 2 tools to c:\games\blood2 and c:\games\b2-tools.
Now comes the tricky part. After you've installed your blood 2 tool kit open up Dedit. Dedit is basicaly the only level editor for the lithtech engine so you're going to have to learn love its quirks quickly. When you load Dedit, press file->new project. It will first warn you that some kind of classes.dll is missing. This is o.k. because we still have work to do to fix this. The next prompt will ask for a project name and then a world name. World is the filename of your map. Blood 2 calls them worlds not maps. This is the same with the ingame command to load your world too.
Now that you have a new project you have to "unrez" the game files. In most quake 2 and doom2 editors you can just load texture and object information by pointing to that games pak or wad file. In Dedit you need to manually extract the files from the compressed file blood2.rez and then place them in your appropriate project folders. To do this we need to use a command line tool so load up a Dos window. (In windows XP press windowskey+R and then type cmd and then enter)
From the dos window use cd to navigate to c:\games\b2-tools\bin from there you're going to use the lithrez command. From here you're going to extract each .rez file from c:\games\blood2\ to c:\games\blood2\blood2. A sample of the command lines needed would be
lithrez c:\games\blood2\blood2.rez c:\games\blood2\blood2\
lithrez c:\games\blood2\blood2P.rez c:\games\blood2\blood2\
lithrez c:\games\blood2\blood2P2.rez c:\games\blood2\blood2\
If you have any troubles then you probably were in the wrong directory. Make sure that you are in c:\games\b2-tools\bin when you type these commands otherwise they won't work.
After you have unrezed you need to grab each file that you need from this new blood2 folder and put it into your project. For now close that dos window and Dedit saving your project so far. Go to the new c:\games\blood2\blood2\ folder and copy the following files: CSHELL.DLL, OBJECT.LTO, SRES.DLL, and CRES.DLL Now you need to find your project folder. Assuming you named your project "NewProject" then you need to go to c:\games\b2-tools\NewProject. Paste those 4 files you copied into this folder.
**Note from zZaRDoZz concerning the above step**This step does not appear in the shogo tutorial or Mic's quick start tutorial.Quote:
Go to the new c:\games\blood2\blood2\ folder and copy the following files: CSHELL.DLL, OBJECT.LTO, SRES.DLL, and CRES.DLL.... Paste those 4 files you copied into this folder.
Now if you go into Dedit and load up your NewProject.dep you won't get the errors anymore. The files you copied are game functions and other classes. You can't even make floors or walls or other solid objects until these files are copied giving dedit information for the brush class.
At this point we need to get content. The first thing you're going to need are textures so open up the c:\games\blood2\blood2\textures folder. You'll notice that the Monolith team was nice enough to sperate textures by color. This kind of causes a problem. Do you see that DIRTYPETEXTURES file that's sitting there? Dedit has to create a directry listing file for any folder that it uses. So in order to copy any textures you have to manually create that folder in Dedit so that it can create this directory file. So load up Dedit and load up your project. On the left click on the textures tab. Now expand the textures folder and then right click on the whit area on the top pane of the textures tab that lists the folders and press add new dirctory. Name this one REDS. Also make a GREYS and a BLUEYELLOW folder while you're at it.
Now you can go back to the c:\games\blood2\blood2\textures folder and grab any texture you want from inside the contained folders. Sadly there's no easy way to preview textures before grabbing them so I recommend that for this first test project that you've created that you copy all of the textures from the REDS, GREYS and BLUEYELLOW folders and copy them to your c:\games\b2-tools\MyWorld\textures\ coinciding folder.
For example copy everything from
C:\games\blood2\blood2\textures\REDS
to
c:\games\b2-tools\MyWorld\textures\REDS
and so on and so forth.
Now if you go back to Dedit and click on the REDS, GREYS or BLUEYELLOW folders in the top pane of the texture tab it will populate the list of textures in that directory and let you preview them. This way when you start creating a real project you can pick and choose textures to start from by previewing them in this first example project.
At this point you can create any basic level. You'll have to do similar things with models, skins and other resources. When I make tutorials on these items I'll reitterate the concept
A few things to keep in mind without going into too much detail. To move your views, click on one of the view panes and hold in the or I or O key while moving your mouse. Also if you hold in I or O and also hold in Right click you'll get different affects. It's easier for you to just play around with it than for me to get specific.
A few shortcut keys to go over for your reference:
X = select a view pane, hold in x and move your mouse to move your green cration point
alt-b = create a simple box brush of a certain size at the green cration point
+ = enlarge the grid size of the currently selected view pane
- = shrink the grid size of the currently selected view pane
ctrl-p = compile ("process") your map. Select the 3d view pane before pressing ctrl-P
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