Yandros on 12/1/2015 at 19:59
I've done several different method for stairs.
1. Place a solid wedge and then use equal-height rectangular air brushes to carve out steps. Sometimes I make them less than the width of the wedge, leaving a slanted uncut edge, which looks pretty cool.
2. Random_Taffer's method of increasing-height solid brushes to form the stairs, after first placing a large airbrush to contain them.
3. A set of thin equal-height rectangular brushes to form stairs which look like they're made of planks of wood (also placed inside an initial air brush). This is great when you have a light source below the stairs as it creates great shadows coming through the gaps, but clearly only works in certain environments; it's not fancy enough for a nobleman's stairs, for example. These can sometimes be more difficult for AI to negotiate, however, but there are ways around that.
What you're suggesting about building stairs out of rotated wedges, so the underside is slanted, should work, although I've never tried it. Although if you want a smooth underside to the stairs, you can just do method 1 or 2 above and then place a wedge airbrush under it at the end, which would probably be better from the standpoint of cell count on the underside of the staircase as compared to a bunch of separate wedges, and is only one extra brush.
No matter how you build them, in my experience the key to avoiding pathfinding issues (besides making sure they are sufficiently wide) is keeping the rise of each step sufficiently low. Certainly 1.0 is the absolute maximum rise per step, and I've seen issues with it so I usually rise 0.75 DU per step, and run at least 1.0 units, and sometimes use a run of 1.5+ if I have the room for it.
One final comment - learn to do stairs. IMO they're one of the single most important things in a mission, since AI can traverse them, but cannot use lifts. So resist the temptation to just stick in lifts because you're feeling lazy, unless the environment warrants - a lift in a warehouse is fine, in a nobleman's manor, not so much (except perhaps in the servant areas). That being said, in DCE there is a lift instead of stairs in the home of one of the major characters. I would much have preferred to put in stairs, but was stuck with the small outer dimensions of the house and just didn't have space for stairs, and after working on it 12 years was not interested in trying to enlarge the house to accomodate stairs (which would affect 4 of 10 missions in the campaign).
Garrett2014 on 12/1/2015 at 22:46
Stairs are a Nightmare. I want to put in steps on a 3/4 incline. What i mean is the rise is 12 feet high and i want the steps to cover 18 feet depth. But no matter how i work it I have to have a step 1.125 deep if its going to rise by 0.75. This would give me 16 steps up. Also when i draw my brush 1x1 it always snaps too 2x2 so i resize it but the brush maintains the 2x2 center for the resized 1x1 brush so i then have to move it .5 x .5 every time. I must be doing something wrong, Anyone able too help with this ?
R Soul on 12/1/2015 at 23:06
16 foot deep and 12 high allows each step to be 1 deep and 0.75 high. As long as each floor-to-floor distance is a multiple of 0.75 or 0.5 stairs are not a nightmare at all. And if you have made a mistake in your early building and you cannot use multiples of those heights, build with either of them from the top down and put a very gentle solid wedge at the bottom to fill the gap to the lower floor.
john9818a on 13/1/2015 at 06:41
Garrett2014 if you use a grid size of 11 you can get those .75 brushes and larger to snap where you want them. I almost always use Russ' first method. When adding in steps I clone the first step and move it to it's position, then clone first and second together, move them, then clone 1-4 and move... this makes creating tall staircases much quicker than trying to clone or create each step one at a time.
Garrett2014 on 13/1/2015 at 15:17
Quote Posted by john9818a
Garrett2014 if you use a grid size of 11 you can get those .75 brushes and larger to snap where you want them. I almost always use Russ' first method. When adding in steps I clone the first step and move it to it's position, then clone first and second together, move them, then clone 1-4 and move... this makes creating tall staircases much quicker than trying to clone or create each step one at a time.
When moving a cloned brush the mouse responsiveness is very low. That mush be great for precise alighnment but its frustrating when you want to move something to another part of the map. How can i increase the travel in dromed when i move my mouse ?
gigagooga on 13/1/2015 at 15:48
By zooming out the view.
Xorak on 14/1/2015 at 05:20
Quote Posted by Garrett2014
Ok guys Ive been reading the Building Principles Tour doc where it shows good and bad ways of building. So having brushes slop over into other brushes is bad but for stairs its good ? I kinda understand that it works out mathematically better so your only using 2 decimal points etc so you live with a little slop but i was just wondering if after you had placed your 2 large wedges to create the stair incline and the ceiling incline why you dont use a series of smaller wedges inverted to create your actual steps ? Then there would be no slop and you can still size it like you would square bruses which are either solid or air depending what methed you were using to carve or add to the wedge to create your steps !
This would work only if you pre-plan your area exceptionally well and the initial wedges are sized with such dimensions that you can then divide them into the smaller wedges for each stair. But if you go back and find something needs to be changed with the rooms around the stairs or the stairs themselves, the entire staircase might not even work anymore and you're stuck with all these useless wedges. Plus it's a real pain to line up angled edges of wedges when they're of different sizes.
I tend to use three methods myself depending on the circumstances:
1. Random_taffer's method of solid brushes increasing in height with each step.
2. An outer air brush filled with .25 solid-brush sized steps, like individual wooden steps with spaces below and between each step, sometimes even overlapping each other depending on the stair and size of the steps
3. A series of 8-foot high air brushes, each one positioned .75 units higher than the one before
Posts and supports I usually build out of objects and add later, since they're the sort of thing that most cause unwanted complexity.
ZylonBane on 14/1/2015 at 19:07
Tellingly, not a single mention of DromEd's built-in staircase tool in this thread.
LarryG on 14/1/2015 at 23:42
Because it doesn't work.
