Readables

written by greebo

Create the brushes

First, you'll need to create two brushes like shown below. One brush (the larger one) will be the readable's background (like a parchment), the other one will show the text of the readable. To avoid Z-fighting, the smaller brush must be a tad thicker than the larger one, as indicated in the screenshot. Just activate the smallest grid size (0.125) and drag it one grid unit larger.

Put these two brushes wherever you want it in your map, in this example I will just leave it floating in the middle of the room for now.

Apply the right textures

It is important to apply the common/nodrawsolid texture onto the brushes (not just the "nodraw" one) to prevent the player clipping into the readable.

Press ESC and select the top face of the smaller brush by selecting it with Ctrl-Shift-LMB. Apply the common/entitygui texture onto it, rotate and fit it (1x1).

Press ESC and select the top face of the larger brush. Select the readables/page/parchment texture from the texture browser, rotate and fit the texture to your needs (1x1). It should now look something like this:

Create the Entity

Press ESC and select both brushes with Shift-LMB.

DoomEdit: Select the atdm:readable_immobile entity and click on "Create"

DarkRadiant: Just right-click into the orthogonal view, select "Create Entity" and choose the atdm:readable_immobile one.

Voilà, the entity is created.

Create your custom text

Create your xdata file containing your readable text. This is explained here: XData File Creation.

Entity Keys/Values

Once you have your custom xdata-File, you are ready to set the entity keys.

DoomEdit: Press ESC and select one of your readable brushes. As they both belong to the same entity, the other brush is selected as well, which is good. Select the Entity Inspector and add the values shown below.

DarkRadiant: Press ESC and open the Entity List by pressing the "L" key. Expand the tree view by clicking the plus sign and select your atdm:readable_immobile_1 (or whatever number it has been assigned) from the list. The two brushes that are associated with this entity become highlighted in the editor views. Open up the Entity Inspector and click on "All properties". Add the values shown here.

readable_face

These three values form the normal vector of the face holding the text. In this example the readable text is facing upwards, its normal vector is pointing upwards too. Therefore we type in the value "0 0 1", which represents a vector pointing straight upwards (x=0, y=0, z=1).

readable_face_tolerance

This value defines how "far" the player has to look away from the readable to leave the "reading mode" and let the on-screen readable disappear. The value "90" is just fine, so we leave it as it is.

xdata_contents

This key holds the name of the readable text as defined in your .xd File. See XData File Creation.

Press OK and save the map, the values should be ok by now.

page1_title & page1_body

Note that it's not exactly required to create an xdata file, you can also add the appropriate keys directly to the entity itself. However, for large maps this should not be the way to go, as maintaining and translating the texts could become more complicated.

Just drop the xdata_contents key and add the following key/value pairs in the Entity Inspector like this:

page1_title    Your Title Here
page1_body     Your Body Text here
gui_page1      guis/readables/page_test.gui (or any other GUI you may have created)

Include the readable script in your map script file

At the moment, the readable script is not included in the Dark Mod scripts per default, so we have to include it for ourselves.

Open up your .script-File (or create one, if you haven't done it yet, named after your map <map_name>.script) and insert the following line at the beginning:

#include "script/darkmod_readables.script"

Note: It's very likely that you may skip this step in the future, as the readable scripts will probably be included in a standard Dark Mod release.

Now compile your map.

Test your Readable!