The transport elevator teleports the player between two different elevator shafts to simulate a real elevator. It is not difficult to construct, but it requires patience.
Create a top floor and upper elevator sector, and a bottom floor and lower elevator sector. Both elevators must be the exact same size, shape, shade, texture, etc. The textures should even be aligned the same. The two floors and elevators must be physically built at proper height differences. This means the top floor must be at least 30-40 PGUP
units higher than the bottom floor. This can be done quickly and easily by highlighting all of the top floor's sectors using Right Alt
in 2D mode, then entering 3D mode and pressing PGUP
at least 30-40 times on the ceiling and then the floor. Place an S[Channel,17]
in the exact same location in each elevator (usually in the middle or a corner). Tag the bottom floor elevator [0,15]
, and tag the top floor elevator [1,15]
. The darker shaded S
indicates the starting floor for the elevator. It must be at least shade 17 or darker (they are pitch black in the official maps). The other S
should remain unshaded to avoid problems.
Notes:
- A player's movement will not be momentarily halted after passing through this type of teleporter. The motion is continuous, which helps to suppress any suspicions of teleportation from the player.
- If a player begins a map touching an elevator sector floor (including the initial floor of a transport elevator), the elevator will be automatically triggered (as in
E1L2.MAP
: "Red Light District", andE2L3.MAP
: "Warp Factor"). - Transport Elevators depend on an adjacent sector's ceiling height in order to determine the height at which to teleport. For this reason, you should not use any effects that change the ceiling height of a sector adjacent to a Transport Elevator. The original map designers made this mistake in
E2L1.MAP
: "Spaceport", which only works correctly by luck/coincidence. - There is a bug with the Transport Elevator effect that causes it to "eat" the height range between its destinations one Z-unit at a time. Eventually it will eat the entire range, until it is teleporting between the destinations instantaneously, and then the elevator will take one last trip in the wrong direction for all eternity. If you've ever wondered why the Transport Elevators in the game travel such ridiculously long distances, this is why. Constructing an extra long distance between the destinations will ensure that the player will virtually never encounter this bug.