Let's Make a Level for Duke Nukem 3D, Part 9

^source

If you'll recall, last time we whipped up a room at the end of that dutch angled corridor. It will be a junction connecting at least two areas where the jetpack and perhaps the hazard boots or steroids will be found. One problem though:

It's entirely unlit! What did I say? No unlit, unshaded rooms allowed!! Something will have to be done about this. SHAM BAM BAMINA!

Presto, just like that. Well not actually, that took nearly a god damned hour. Lighting is a bitch in this engine, and doing shadows on sloped surfaces is a double, triple, quadruple bitch.

Notice how I used flattened, transparent, darkened versions of the bridge sprites as their shadows. This is also how we'll create the shadow for the platform back in the other room.

Since the floor is slime, by hitting T and then 1 once per sector, I can change their lotag to "water". The player will now sink into the floor in these sectors and it will generally behave like waist deep water.

The player cannot submerge unless I create an underwater sector to submerge to because of how water works in this engine, but I'll cover that when we do the underwater maze.

Welp. Good news and bad news, folks. The good news is the slime behaves like a liquid now. The bad news is, the flattened palette 4 sprites I wanted to make shadows with refuse to be transparent. I tried a bunch of things to fix it, nothing worked. They will need to be removed. What a shame.

Sprite shadows worked fine for this platform. The thing is I couldn't shade the bottom of the platform darker than the top since floor aligned sprites assume the shade of the sector they're in. So I just changed the bottom to an inherently darker texture with more greys and blacks, which works acceptably well.

Anyways here's the room we were working on with the troublesome sprite shadows removed and all the other entries/exits added. I won't end it right here because that would be a tease. I'll at least start on the jetpack jumping puzzle.

That's a long shaft. Giggity. That little opening you see is to the room we just came from. This is where the player will hop from one sprite based platform to the next in order to reach the jetpack, which will then make returning a breeze.

However, we'll begin making those platforms next time. Stay tuned!

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^{...and Stay Cozy, too!}