The Beginner's Guide to Red Faction Mapping
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Tutorial: The Beginner's Guide to Red Faction Mapping Prepared by Goober. |
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This page is under construction. The information on this page may not yet be complete. |
Overview
Goal
The goal of this Beginner's Guide is to show you how to build a very simple Red Faction map, entirely from scratch. We'll cover basic geometry, texturing, lighting, pickups, nav points, and enemies. You'll also learn the basics of how to navigate in the level editor, and the small number of hotkeys you'll need to use.
Audience
This Beginner's Guide is just that - a guide for beginners. If you've used RED before, you probably know most of this stuff. There's no harm in skimming down through it to see if there's a tip or two for you to pick up, but in general if you're an experienced RED user, you'll probably get more from some of the more advanced tutorials listed on the RF1 Editing Main Page.
Assumptions
If you're reading this tutorial, I'm assuming you've played Red Faction at least a few times and have a basic understanding of how to use software on a computer - that's it! Other than that, we'll take it from the ground floor and build up.
The Basics
Before we begin
Red Faction is the game, GeoMod is the engine on which the game runs, and RED is the level editing tool used to create maps for the game.
Red Faction was originally released for the PlayStation 2, then later for the PC - both in 2001. As you can probably imagine, there are a number of issues that can come up when trying to run software written over 20 years ago on a modern computer, not to mention the fact that the game hasn't received an official update since a few months after the initial release. Thankfully, the community stepped in to remedy that situation - Dash Faction is a community-made patch, which is basically essential for anyone planning to play or develop for the game these days. It adds tons of new modern features, fixes all of the most relevant problems the game has, and lets you play the game without issue on modern computers.
If you don't already have Dash Faction installed, you should go do that before proceeding with this tutorial - it's very simple to install, only takes a few minutes, and there's a full set of instructions over in the Dash Faction Installation Guide.
Launching RED
Open the Dash Faction launcher, then click the "Level Editor" button.
The RED window will appear, and it should look virtually identical to the screenshot on the right - a confusing mess of buttons, text, and 4 black panels. Not to worry, it'll start to make sense soon!
Viewports
Those 4 black panels in front of you are called viewports. Viewports offer a view into what your map is going to look like once you load it in-game. RED supports two different types of viewports: - 3D (perspective - ie. Free Look) - 2D (orthographic - ie. Top, Right, Front, etc.)
The active viewport at any given time is the viewport outlined with a red border. You can change the active viewport simply by hovering over a viewport with your cursor. Some hotkeys and other RED functions behave differently depending on which viewport is active, such as the movement and rotation of objects.
Moving around in the viewports
When looking at a viewport, you are viewing through a camera that you can control. RED offers the ability to move the camera around using the keyboard or the mouse. Generally, the keyboard camera controls are more user-friendly than the mouse controls. That said, the keyboard controls do require a numpad, so if your keyboard doesn't have a numpad, you'll need to use the mouse controls.
<hotkeys>
The rest of the UI
Rather than explain what every button and panel does right now, let's dive right into creating your first map and I'll explain the functions that you'll need to use along the way.
To note: I'm only going to explain the functions you need to use within the scope of this tutorial. If you're wondering what a function does, and it's not covered in this tutorial, the RED User Guide has a full and detailed explanation you can reference for each and every button, panel, toolbar option, etc. within RED.
Enough of that, I want to make a map!
Your first room
In the middle of the free look viewport, you should see a cyan colored wireframe cube. The same cube is represented as a square in the 2D viewports. This is called the Cookie Cutter.
(WIP)