Ladders

[Tutorial]

category
General Half-Life 2/Entities

description
Bit harder to setup then the original method in HL1, but easy once you know how.

keywords
ladders, ladder, func_useableladder.

In the forums, there has been a few people having trouble with HL2 ladders. This tutorial will hopefully explain how to make the ladders work.

Start off by making the area you want the ladder to be placed and make sure there is enough room for the player to fit through the gap.



Next place either a brush with a ladder texture or use a ladder model. In this example I will use a brush



This is the bit where most people go wrong. In HL1 editing, you would simply create a brush tied to func_ladder, well pay attention as it is slightly different.

Select your entity tool, and place the entity func_useableladder at the bottom of your ladder, and name it ladder1 as shown below. Important: The entity must not touch any of the brush work, or the ladder will not work.



Now select your func_useableladder entity and click on the small white circle in the center and drag it to the top of the ladder as show below.



Next select your entity tool and place the entity info_ladder_dismount at the bottom of your ladder at each point that a player could dismount, and also on the upper floor. The screens below should better your understanding.




Make sure the info_ladder_dismount entites all have the same LadderName as needed, in this example it would be ladder1

Thats it - Hope it helped.

Cr4ig

[Swatje]

can this be used cs too?

[Serever]

if you want to make a ladder on css, find the texture "tools/toolsinvisibleladder" and make a box where you want your ladder to be. tie it to a 'func_ladder'. whenever you touch this box, youll behave liek your on a ladder, but you can jump off and stuff easier than on hl2.

note: you cant see this ingame. use a ladder model for the visual part

[Blink]

There is a tutorial for CS: Source ladders

[RaccoonKing]

Isn't this method (I'm not criticizing the tut, I'm criticizing Valve) ridiculously overcomplicated, player-unfriendly, and a gigantic system resource tax compared with the old way?

[Grim Reaper]

Yes very, and especially compared to the cs:s way, why they had to make it different only they and god knows

[Blink]

Isn't this method (I'm not criticizing the tut, I'm criticizing Valve) ridiculously overcomplicated, player-unfriendly, and a gigantic system resource tax compared with the old way?

Yeah, who knows why

[Yoshi]

maybe because they wanted to do something about the anoying climbing ladders from hl1?

[RaccoonKing]

Is it still possible to use the old way?

[acountddd]

is there a way to make npc climb ladders?

[Hyp-R]

they did it this way. so your confined to the ladder.

so you could only get on and off the way the mapper see's best. not like old style where you could get on anywhere.

[Sauce]

Where can the ladder model be found? Can it's size or the number of rungs be changed or is it fixed to the size of the model and you have to place multiple ladders instead to get the size you want?

EDIT: Also, are the

Code: Select all

 info_ladder_dismount

entities just for where you want the player to get off or is it where you get on also?

[InvestmentBanking]

you can find it in your c17 models folder

[nub]

Well the only reason why this tutorial to make a simple half life 2 ladder is so complicated is because that the ladders made in hl2 by valve just work so damn good. And, to save you all the trouble and to make a better looking ladder using the actual ladder model. Get out the object tool and go to the dropdown list right above the entity list. It should say entities in the dropdown list. Open it up and find prefabs HL2. Select that and then go into the dropdown list where you would select your entities and it will look a whole lot different. Find simple_ladder. Select that and just place one in your map. And there you have it, a perfect, working ladder. You can also make the ladder model a prop_physics_override and then give the ladder a name of "ladder". Then select all of the ladder entities and parent them to the ladder model itself and then you have a perfect, working physics ladder!. I would make the ladder have two climbable sides if you were to make it a physical ladder.

nub

EDIT: When making the ladder physical, if you were to try and select ONLY the ladder, it would select the entities used to make the ladder work as well. Just go into a 2D view and select the ladder group and right click and select "ungroup". And then do the static ladder convert to physics ladder and the parenting crap, you get it. (i hope)

nub (again)

[nub]

is there a way to make npc climb ladders?

info_climb_node or something. Im sure its an info entity, maybe its a node.

Info_climb i guess. Just place some in a line on a wall or ladder i guess. I think this is for bots in cs:s. You probably have to use path_corners and a scripted sequence in order for combine to climb a ladder.