Entities

What are entities?

Entities are broken down into a few sections. Things you create with brushes and curves are brush based entities. Things like lights, doors, triggers etc are other forms of entities, normally with an entity, you can change the properties and features.

If you right click in radiant, everything from "AI" down can be classed as an entity.

If your running on desktop of 800x600 you wont see "trigger" (although you cant see it, you can actually select it) and you wont get "weapon" and "worldspawn", so if you ever want to use the entity set of "weapon" you will have to change your desktop resolutions I guess, its not used much anyway, if ever. I myself use 800x600 as a resolution and havent had to change it once. Worldspawn can be selected by choosing any normal brush and pressing "N", rather than using that menu.

Using entities

Theres a variety of ways you can use entities, for things such as lights, props etc you can just place them in your map, by right clicking in a window, then clicking what you want. Then with it selected, you can select its properties by pressing "n".

The other way is if you need a brush you have created to be an entity, such as if you have made a door brush and now need to make it into an actual door. What you need to do here is select your brush, then "right click" and chose the entity "func_door". Then your brush will of turned into that entity. You can see this by selecting the brush and then pressing "N" to bring up its details, if you have made a brush into a func_door it will be selected and you can enter various keys into the boxes.

If you look at the image below you can see ive made a brush into a func_explosive and im now viewing its properties:

You can see at the top "func_explosive" is selected, this means our brush is a func_explosive, which we already know. Now below that is a descriptions and information's screen. It first gives the command you can type in. As we can see it says "EXPO" then says "only rockets can damage it, grenades etc", in this case we can see below that screen some flags you can press, one is called "EXPO", if we click that, you can see it will then say "spawnflags 32" in the window above.

We know from the description that what we have done is set "EXPO" on, so that our brush can only be damaged by rockets and explosives. If you turn on other flags such as dynamite the number in the "spawnflags" changes, you don't need to worry about what is says, all you need to know is that if the buttons pressed in, that means you have selected it.

Above we can see ive chosen "EXPO" and then "spawnflags 32" has appeared to show that its ON

Now we can see I've also selected "dynomite" and the "Spawnflags" number has changed to 96. Like I said before you dont need to worry what number it says, if you have pressed the flag button then its set to ON.

This isn't the only way to enter things into the properties of the entity. You also will often need to look at the descriptions window and then enter information into the "key" and "value" boxes. In this case I can see in the description box it says I can have "type" "type of debris "glass" "wood" "rock" etc". I know that I need to write in "type" in the key box, and then write in what material I want it to be, in this case I want it to be rock, so I have written in "rock" see the image below:

Now once I have wrote that in I press enter and then the window will change to show I've chosen "rock" as the type:

You can see above it now has "type" "rock" listed in its properties. You can add all sorts of things, just read the descriptions and it tells you what to put in the key, and what to put in the value. Sometimes the descriptions might not be too good and you will have to think logically what values you can enter, like it says you can type in "health" and the default is 100, which is obviously full, so if you type in "health" in the key and "50" in the value, it means 50 health will be set.

You will also notice below where you can enter keys and values some buttons:

  • del key/pair: This means delete the selected key
  • sound: Means choose a sound, although this doesnt work for most of the entities, you don't seem to use it much. It doesn't mean for doors you can press "sound" and then chose a sound and it will come on, that wont work. In fact im not entirely sure what you can use it for [Editor note: probably target_speaker entities], the same goes for "model" too. [Editor note: misc_model]
  • Up and Dn: Directions, can be used for sliding doors and things to move them up or down. This is in relation to the top view.
  • 45,90,135 etc (The numbers on the small square boxes): The numbered section on the left is a little harder to explain, say you have made a sliding door, you need to say which way to slide, so if you look in your top view at your door and think what way it wants to go, then look at the numbered section choose a number in the direction it is. Better explained in a doodle like picture, see figure 2.6.
Fig. 2.6
Problems, Comments, Queries > Forum
Tutorial by eyeronik
Edited by WeblionX