I know how to make a staircase, but I heard it wasn't advised because of collision issues? Then how do you make a staircase? Put a poly over the stairs and apply a translucent texture?

Where did you hear it wasn't advised? I use a stair model all the time in my maps, nothing bad ever happens.

Not just translucent. Completely transparent. It's something I thought of a while ago, just like weapon anims in BFII. Now, of course, with the Pandemic exporter you just need to have your collision model have a single poly there instead of the stairs.

I heard it wasn't advised from someone in the DMI forums. I posted my building and it had a staircase, they said it wasn't advised. Ok, thanks fluffy.

I think the reason they said it wasn't advised was because you can get some stairs that are pre-made in the DMI pack. But, if you want to use your own stairs, there should be no harm in doing so.

No they said, if I knew how to quote from different posts, @ wonderboy, i think stairs weren't advised because of collision problems

There are some pretty annoying collision problems, indeed. If you've ever played Jedi Temple by Vyse, you'd know what I'm talking about.

Stairs and collisions for them are easy, what is not is which program and export method you use that isn't.

For the stairs model you just create the stairs as you want them to be. For the collision you just make a ramp the runs through the middle of the stairs or just slightly below the middle.
Now if you were using XSI and pandemic exporter you would just name the ramp collision hide it and export your model and you would be done.

If you are using other exporters that require 1 mesh then you would have to some how texture the ramp so it is transparent so it is not seen in game and the ramp would have to run closer to the top of the stairs so you wouldn't get stuck on the top corners of the steps.

Now if the steps are short enough in height, about half of what is normal you may be able to just use these steps as the collision but they wouldn't look "normal" but there is a chance you'd still get hung up on them.


Hope that helps

well I'm using SketchUp and im not sure what you mean by a mesh because i am new to this. I made a staircase and made a single poly covering the entire top and the gaps between stairs on the side, then made a completely transparent texture

that should work too.

mesh by the way is just how an object is called in XSI

thanks fragme. helped a lot. now I now what it means by meshes . also thnks fluffy.