Creating 3D bridges
Due to Doom's (and thus ZDoom's) rendering engine limitations, true 3D cannot really be made... yet (who knows what the future will bring?!). However, you can make working bridges by using InvisibleBridge and a few linedef tricks. And this article is supposed to tell you how.
Start off by kick-starting your favorite map editor - I use SLADE 2.0 beta (for those curious). Make the two planes and the obstacle in between, I used a nukage pool here. My sectors have a ceiling height of 256, the planes have a floor of 0 and the nukage pool has a floor of -128. Also you'll obviously need a player start so you can play the map and I also put some yellow lamps on the edges.
Now, assuming we want one of those bridges shaped like a row of X:es, put into the pool one segment of that bridge, an X. I myself did a 64x64 one, composed of four sectors.
Now, select all of the linedefs of the X and:
- give each a *middle* texture of STEP2 (any other STEP works fine as well), to both front and back sidedefs
- set the Y offset, again of both front and back side, to the negative of the subtraction of the ceiling height of the sector the pit and the floor height of the planes, or yoffset = -(pitceilingheight-planefloorheight). So, my ceiling height is 256 in both planes and the pit and my plane floor is 0, so my sidedefs' Y-offsets must be -(256-0) = -256.
Next, copy the linedefs so that you'll get the complete bridge. It's a good idea to merge all pit sectors into one sector again.
Now, add InvisibleBridges (DoomEd #9991) thing to the center of the segments and open their properties. The Z height of the CustomBridge should be the subtraction of the plane floor height and the pit floor height. In my case that is 128 - 0 = 128. Also, the arguments need to be set. The first argument is the radius of the segment, 64/2 = 32 in my case, and the second argument the thickness. STEP2 is 16x8 in size, so the second argument should be 8 in my case.
The bridge is now finished! You can download the WAD I made for this tutorial: File:Bridgexample.zip
