Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Env_Beam's

eEvn_beams can be a little confusing if you don't know how to properly use them. In this article I'll teach you everything you need to know about them.

First of all, what is an env_beam? It's a point entity that creates a beam/laser sprite between two specified entities.

Important entity properties:
Render FX: This is how the generated sprite will render, there is a drop down list with a few options to choose from.
Start Entity: This is where the beam will be born, pick the name of the entity you want it to be born at.
Ending Entity: This is where it will end, again pick the name of the entity. The beam will create a beam/laser sprite between the two entities, you can get pretty creative here if you use trains to make animated beams.
Brightness: This determines how opac the beam will be, 0 being not visible and 255 being completely visible.
Beam Color: This is where you set the color in RBG values, 255 being the most, and 0 being none at all.
Radius: This is rarely used, however I'll explain how it works since I rarely see mappers taking advantage of it. Basically you only use this if you don't have an ending entity. Radius determines how far the beam will travel to create an ending, thus randomizing the beam. If you have 4 walls 250 units away from the beam in each direction and your radius is 249, then you won't generate a beam. The beam will travel as far as the radius indicates until it finds something to end on, usually any solid brush.
Life: This basically says how long the beam is going to be active, 1 being 1 second and 0 being infinity.
Amount of Noise: This tells you how much the beam will fluctuate in movement between the starting and ending entity. 0 means it will be a perfectly still beam with no movement, and 255 having the most movement and looking the most uncontrolled.
Sprite Name: You generally want to keep this at the default, but if you want to you can change it. This is what sprite will be generated between the start and ending entity.
Strike again time: This is how long before the beam will be generated again. if you have a life of 1 sec, and strike again time is 2 sec, your beam will appear for 1 sec, then re-appear 1 sec later. I've been experimenting with negative values on this to generate multiple randomized beams with one entity and it's pretty cool. -0.7 gives you about 15 beams or so
Damage/Sec: Beams generally suck at doing damage so if you want to create a beam that does damage you should probably use Env_Laser's or if you have a static beam, a trigger_hurt with the appropriate damage. Players can avoid damage from beams by jumping through them, trigger_hurts are impossible to jump through unless you have extreme coordination with another player to jump through at the same time. Env_Lasers can be jumped through but it's a lot harder to jump through those than it is with a beam.

And that's it! This should be all the info you really need for env_beams, if you have any questions or suggestions for future articles I'd love to hear them.

16 comments:

  1. i like this kinda stuff. i hope you continue posting articles about this type of crap cause i look forward to them

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  2. thanks, i will be updating this blog with many more articles like this :)

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  3. Thanx man. I'm a big half life fan.

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  4. very good and easy to understand information
    thanks for this lesson about env_beams^^

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  5. Wow! Now I truly am schooled in the art of eEvn_beams. Thanks so much!!!

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  6. thanks for all of this, i am a huge half life series fan

    looking forward to future posts

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  7. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  8. i did not get any of this... but it reminded me of tron

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  9. my roommate is a big half life fan. I could never get into it but it seems pretty cool.

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  10. very informative! I like your blog, I'll be following.

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  11. nice, I used to love half life 1

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  12. Keep this up and I may have to learn to be a gamer.

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