Illustrated Mirror
Tutorial
by QRS
In this tutorial I will try to show how to
make a room with a mirror which shows Laras reflection in
it. The first step is not hard but the reflection part can
be very frustrating to do right. At least for a beginner.
And yes, I'm talking of my own experience about making a
fully working mirror. The only experience you really need
following this tutorial is a few days of trial and error
with the editor. You also need some basic knowledge of the
script files. I will try and explain everything I can in
detail but the basic stuff like how to make a room, making
doors, saving the project etc I will leave out. Same goes
for the basic script tasks. Why so? Well there are tons of
tutorials for that and don't forget the official manual!
Also, a mirror room is not the first room you should try and
do! If you are reading this and have yet to build a single
rooms using the TRLE I strongly suggest that you wait with
this until you have some experience of building a few basic
rooms!
Note 1: There are a few things you have to worry
about before making this mirror project. Scroll down to the
end and read for further info and credits for the people who
discovered them.
Note 2: In my example I use a room in which I already
have a few rooms built. Just ignore these rooms (to the
right of the mirror project in 2d view) as they have nothing
to do with this example.
Note 3: I'm from Sweden and I use a Swedish OS. Hence
the strange words in the explorer and calculator pics. I'm
pretty sure that you can navigate using these pictures
anyway, as the menus are on the same spots in most of the
languages.
The
Mirror
As I said earlier, this is the easy part. At least if you
have some experience in working with the TRLE. In this
example I will show the easiest way of making the mirror
rooms. I can already hear you say Did he say rooms? Is it
more than one room? I'm afraid it is. To make the mirror
you have to trick the editor into fooling yourself in seeing
one room with a mirror. Sounds complicated? Nope its not!
The whole idea is the make two rooms and put transparent
textures between the rooms. The problem is the reflection
but more of that later.
Step 1
First of all you need to make a room. In my example I have
built a room of 7x8 squares. (Feel free to make it any size
you want.) The height of the room is 12 clicks. The room
number in my example is 46. ( I will refer to this room as
46 from now on). Your first task is to texture the rooms
walls, ceiling and floor. It is not important right now to
make anything special. Just make sure that there are no
black holes when you run the game later on.
Step 2
Use your right mouse button and highlight all squares in
your room and click on the copy button. You should
now have an exact copy of room 46. In my case the new room
is called 47.
Step 3
Highlight room 47 and choose mirror from the room
dropdown menu. Room 47 is now a perfect mirror of room
46!
Step 4
You now have to make a door between the rooms. Make sure
that you put room 47 to the left of room 46.
Highlight room 46, switch to 3d view and make a door on the
whole left side to room 47.
Step 5
Now you need to make the doors between the rooms
transparent. Make sure that Face edit is on and you
are in room 46. Highlight the door to room 47 and click on
toggle opacity so the door will be highlighted red.
Now click on the transparent and double sided
buttons and choose a good texture for the mirror. I suggest
something simple for now as the perfect texture can wait
until you are done with this tutorial. (Note that I darkened
both the rooms so the transparent texture between the doors
should look better for the tutorial. You can do that later
on if you wish.)
Repeat step 5 starting from room 47 and apply the same
textures from that side.
We are done!! At least with the mirror. For making this look
better and the transparent textures more mirror like, you
need to make the room darker. Feel free to experiment with
the lightning before proceeding to the next step. This is
how it looks when you start the game:
If you are in a hurry and will experiment with the lighting
effects later, you will see that Lara is still not present
in the mirror and that takes us to . . .
The
reflection
This part is tricky so make sure that you follow these
instructions exactly before going on further on your own.
Also, don't forget to read the notes at the end of this
tutorial first!! I will try to make sure that you don't fall
into any pits but it's up to you to backup your scripts!! Ok
don't be afraid. It is not as dangerous as it sounds. I just
want you to be careful ok?
Step 1
Go to room 46 and click on the upper left square. Check the
coordinates for that square in the info page under all the
buttons. In my example it shows Selected block [ X:28
Y:32] Write down the coordinate for X on a piece of
paper or if you have a good memory just remember it. Also
write down or remember the room number (46)
Step 2
Now its time to leave the editor. You can save your project
now if you wish. Use the built in calculator in windows and
turn it into advanced mode by clicking on advanced
from the view dropdown menu (visa in my example).
We now have to calculate a formula using the X coordinate.
You did write it down right?
The formula is: X+1*1024. In my example that makes 28+1*1024 = 29696.
Check the hex button and see how it turns into
something else. In my case 7400 but don't be surprised to
see letters combined with the numbers. You now have the
hexadecimal numbers of the formula and unlike the decimal
0-9 numbers we now have 0-9 + A-F to worry about. If you are
not interested in that and want to keep making the
reflection work just write down the outcome you get in hex!
Step 3
Important! If you are using the new
TRNG game engine to build your mirrors rooms, you will
require different script entries to get them to work. In
addition to the usual mirror rooms, you can now have
mirrored floors and ceilings. You will find the new scripts
in the NGLE Manual here -
NGLE Mirror rooms
As I said earlier, I will not go into detail of how to find
your script file etc. (I have provided a picture from my
example though!)
Open the script.txt file in any text editor and look
after your level in the text. Put this text in a separate
line in your script for your level:
Mirror= 46,$7400.
46 is the room number and the value is the hex numbers you
wrote down earlier.
Step 4
Save the script file back to itself and double click on the
English. bat file.
After a brief dos view of a dos window, leave with a grin on
your face, cause you have completed the mission! If you did
not save your project earlier in the TRLE of course. Now you
only need to run the tr2pc program and start your
level. Viola! Lara's reflection is finally in the mirror.
This is how it looks:
Now you will need to set better lighting, shadows, objects,
better textures etc. to really get the right feeling but I
leave that to you.
Notes and credits:
There are a few things you should be aware of before making
this project, otherwise the reflection will not work. There
might still be other factors that I'm not aware of. I will
update this tutorial as soon as I find out.
1. Make sure that the mirror room is to the left of the
normal room. (Credits to Oxy for that info.)
2. You can't have any empty room slots with lower numbers
than the mirror room. In my example not any empty room slots
under 45. (Credits to Essgee for that info.)
ALWAYS make a copy of your script files. Why not the whole
script folder just to be sure?
Don't forget to run the English.bat file after
changing the script. It can save you from a few frustrating
hours of things not working.
A huge thanks too Oxy and Essgee for the information and
help in understanding how to make a mirror with reflection.
A special THANK YOU! To George M for helping me put together
all this info into a tutorial with pics and text. Also for
hosting the tutorial!
Good luck in making a mirror project and feel free to use,
copy and spread this tutorial as much as you like.
QRS
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