Creating Portals (doorways etc) in Constructor

Having just spent about an hour trying to figure out how to do this I thought I'd type it up for anyone who's also a complete noob and might need some help...

I'm writing a space sim and after getting all the engine changes in place (phew) I thought I'd concentrate on making some simple space stations to play around with but when I hollowed out the sections where I wanted the ship docking to occur and exported the dif file, I place the station in my scene and tried to fly into the docking port... bang. My ship collided with thin air!

OK, so this is probably the point where many seasoned Torque peeps will laugh, but how was I to know I needed to actually set up where entrances are? :o)

So, all you need to do to make a VERY simple test object is this:

Create a cube primitive using the Build Cube button on the tools menu (top left). - Make sure you have the create tab selected so you can see the options I'm talking about.


Next, we're going to hollow out this cube to make a space for our ship to dock so click the modify tab in the tools box and click the hollow brush button. If you get an error about not having a brush selected, click on your box in the perspective view first, then click the hollow button.

You'll get asked how thick you want the walls, the default is 0.5 and we'll leave it like that for the moment.


As you can see, the program has created an interior area inside our box. Cool eh? Gotta love those guys at GG!

So now we have a box with an interior, how do we make an opening so that we can walk (or fly) inside?

First, go back to the create tab on the tool box and click the Build Cube button again. We're going to build another cube and use it to cut a hole in our current box by using CSG Subtract.

Once you've created your new cube, move it so that it intersects the first box where you want the "door" to be. You can move your obects by clicking the Modify tab in tools box and then clicking the Translate button.


Now click the CSG Subtract button. Once you've done that, to see your results, move the new box away from the old one and you'll see something similar to this:


Okey, so we've made the door, now lets tell Torque to actually let peeps in!

Press CTRL-Z to undo your move action so that the new box is back intersecting the old one. Now we tell the Constructor that this new box is actually a portal.

To do that, click the Object tab in the properties menu, then click Portal. Your new box will turn pink like so:


This is it... now the bit that really tripped me up was that once I'd done all of this, when I exported the dif file, it still didn't work!

The trick is to export using the export menu's map2dif plus. See here:


That's it! This is also the first tutorial I've ever written so excuse the crappy arrows in the pics!

Let me know if you need any help with it.