Walk-in buildings

Where the interior stands

The World workspace decides where the exported interior is placed:

World: at a world position and heading.
Walk-in: inside an existing building of the map, entered through its own doors.
Teleport: an entrance in the world and an arrival point inside. The export adds modlo_teleport.lua with a marker and an E prompt at each end and a faded teleport. The Entrance is in world coordinates; the Arrival is in the interior’s own space (the plan’s coordinates, z = the floor of the level).

A walk-in interior has five tabs on the World page, in the order of the work: Placement, Openings, Walls, Edit building and Map files. A tab shows a count and a dot while something needs a look; selecting a mark or a part brings its tab forward.

Placement

Paste in-game coordinates (x, y, z) into the World page and press Find: the buildings of the map around the point are listed (the map the game loads, DLC changes applied). Small objects too lists props and small pieces of the map as well. The building itself is listed before its decal overlay.

The building selected in the list is shown in the view as a ghost, with the models it comes with, where Build inside this building would put it, and the view turns to it: click through the list to see which one is which.

The interior then follows the chosen building through an Offset and a Turn in its space. The building shows as a Ghost, Normal or Hidden reference, and Show its collision draws the map’s collision as red edges.

Drop onto the floor finds the floor of the building under the point from its collision (else from its model). A building made to be seen and not entered has no floor at all (the used car showroom cs6_03_usedcarmc001): the ground floor then goes to the bottom of its walls.

Problems warns when rooms reach outside the building, and when a walk-in interior has no building yet.

The models it comes with

The map builds a building from several models placed in the same map file: its decals, detail meshes, emissive window glass, ivy and the props placed on it (wall lights, window boxes). When you pick the building they are found and listed on the Placement tab under Imported with the building, in three groups:

Pieces of the building: models of the building’s own area that lie mostly inside it (Michael’s house: bh1_48_michael_decla to decld, _deta to detd, bh1_48_em_a, the ivy). Ticked.
Props on it: game props its map file places on it. Ticked; they are drawn but never changed, because a prop’s model is used all over the map.
Named after it, reaching beyond it: overlays of a whole plot. Not ticked.

A ticked model is drawn with the building in the same Ghost / Normal mode and follows it when the interior moves or is lined up; the openings cut it as they cut the building, and the export writes it when it changed. Untick one to leave it as the game has it.

Click a row to see why a model cannot be edited (a prop, a scaled or a shared model) or to press Edit its mesh: the whole model becomes a part of the building in edit mode (see Editing the building). Look again reads the map again and keeps your choices.

Included, Left out or Removed

A row’s panel has three states under In the map, for every placement of that model:

State	What happens
Included	Drawn with the building, moves with it, cut by your openings and editable like the building itself.
Left out	The game’s model stays in the map as it is; the view does not draw it.
Removed	The view does not draw it either, and the export takes it out of the map.

For a removed model, the map file that places it is written again under the game’s own name into stream/ without that one entity (the wall lights and window boxes of Michael’s house are all in hei_bh1_48_strm_0.ymap). Everything else in the file stays exactly as it was. Several removed models of one file, and a game interior replaced from the same file, go into one file. Put the model back to Included or Left out and the next export deletes the replacement it wrote earlier (the export keeps a list in modlo_replaced_maps.txt).

A removal is refused, with the reason in the panel and in Problems, when the entity has LOD children, is an LOD level itself, hangs under an LOD parent in another file (the parent’s count of children would be wrong: the emissive glass of Michael’s house does) or cannot be found in its file. When other files point at entities of the file (the LOD links count the entities of their parent file) they are written too, with the shifted numbers.

The game’s floor inside the rooms

The map often has ground or a floor inside a building: the car lot under the used car showroom runs up to a metre in past its front windows, 2 cm over an interior floor laid at the bottom of its walls, and showed through it.

Floor > Clear the game’s floor inside the rooms on the Placement tab (on by default) makes the export take the game’s faces that lie flat from 15 cm under each room’s floor to 50 cm over it, inside the room’s outline and its doorways’ thresholds, out of:

the building’s model,
the map models standing in it (the lot, decals on it),
the map’s collision.

The interior’s own floor and its collision take their place. Walls, pillars and furniture standing in a room keep their faces, and the ground outside the rooms stays. The section names what it clears, and a model it cannot change (a game prop used all over the map, terrain) is named with the reason. A game interior’s own collision is left as it is.

Marking doorways and windows

The Openings tab marks where the interior meets the outside, so the export can cut them through the building. Press Mark an opening, then:

Drag: drag a rectangle on the wall. A corner within 10 cm of a vertex of the model goes onto it (vertex snap, as in Blender; Model vertices in the snapping popover; the cross under the pointer shows the vertex a press takes), the edges snap to the model’s straight edges and sizes round to 5 cm. Alt frees it all.
Detect: click inside a recess and it is found, with a preview under the pointer.
Corners: pick 2 or 4 corners.

Keep marks upright (on) stands every mark on a wall upright, its face vertical and its top and bottom level, even when the face you click or the corners you pick lean a little. A floor or roof opening keeps its own angle.

The selected mark has edge handles and fields for Width, Height, Sill, Cut depth and Cut in front. A mark is a Door (cuts the model and the collision) or a Window (the model only, unless Walk / shoot through is on). Auto depth measures the wall in the model and the collision files, because a game wall can stand a metre behind the visible facade.

A Door’s cut leaves what the doorway stands on: every face lying flat less than 30 cm over its bottom edge (the ground in front of it, a step, the threshold) stays in the model and the collision, so the cut never opens a hole into the ground.

The self-check

The export and the World page look through every opening with rays against the files as written and say what still blocks it (“hi@bh1_48_0.ybn still blocks the doorway 0.82 m behind the facade: make the cut deeper”), in the export report and in Problems. A tick, a triangle or a cross in the list shows what the self-check found.

Using a mark

Line the interior up with a doorway: the interior’s origin goes to the middle of the doorway’s foot, and the first room is as wide as the door plus a metre on each side, rounded up to the grid, so the door stands exactly in the middle of its front wall.
Opening in the wall: turn the mark into a door or window of the nearest wall (within 1 m).
Window prefab: copy the building’s own model of that window into a prop (see Window prefabs).

A door or window of the interior dragged or resized along the same wall snaps onto a mark’s edges, centre, sill and head (Building’s openings in the snapping popover), and Match the building’s opening in its Properties makes it equal to the mark. See Lining up with the building’s openings.

Several marks at once

Ctrl+click adds a mark to the selection, Shift+click selects the marks from the last one clicked to this one, and Select all / Select none do what they say. Every selected mark is outlined in orange in the view.

With two or more selected, Make openings makes a door or window in the interior wall along each of them (a Door mark makes a door, a Window mark a window, at the mark’s width, height and height above its storey’s floor, kept inside the wall and under the ceiling), in one undo step. A mark with no wall along it, one that does not fit, or one whose wall already has an opening there (an earlier mark’s or one from before) is skipped, and the panel lists each one with its reason until the selection changes. Draw the walls first, then select the marks and press the button once.

Walls from the building

On the Walls tab, Trace a room and click inside the building, or Trace the whole level. The building’s model and collision are sliced near the walls’ tops, above any furniture (Furniture height, 2 m), so a doorway parts two rooms and furniture never becomes a wall.

A click only previews: the outline is dashed with its wall count and area, and the faces it runs along are green. Clearance, Simplify and Smallest room change it at once.
Accept (Enter) adds the walls as one undo step; Cancel (Esc) drops it.
The whole level traces every closed room that has a ceiling and puts the wall between two rooms on one line.

A shell from explode points

For a room the trace gets wrong (an open plan, furniture to the ceiling, a shape you want simpler or more exact), lay the shell out yourself on the Walls tab under Explode points.

Place explode points, then click inside the room. Each point casts rays all round (Rays per point, 720) through the building, sliced near the walls’ tops like the trace, so furniture under Furniture height does not stop them and a marked doorway counts as closed. The view shows the burst of rays, the walls they met as blue lines, the corners they found as yellow squares and the ends of walls (a jamb, a pilaster) as orange diamonds. Add points until every wall of the room has been seen.
Place corners and click the room’s corners in order, on the building’s inner wall faces. A click snaps to a corner the rays found, to where the lines of two walls meet (a corner hidden behind a wardrobe, or seen from two points), to a wall’s end or onto a wall’s line; Shift places it freely. A corner near nothing the rays found goes to the grid. The corners are numbered and the walls Build would make are dashed. Backspace takes the last corner back; a click on the first corner closes the room.
Build shell (Enter) draws the walls with their outer faces on the clicked corners (half their thickness and the Clearance inside them, as the trace does), in one undo step. Fit to the roof applies to them too.

The options under the buttons:

Square the walls (on) holds every wall that runs within the Angle tolerance (8 degrees) of the building’s square, the direction most of the walls the rays found run along or across, exactly to it; with 45 degree walls too, walls near 45 degrees become exactly 45 degrees. The corners go where the straightened walls meet, and a bay at 30 degrees keeps its angle. Clicks a few centimetres off no longer leave slightly crooked walls.
Line up heads and sills (5 cm): the doors and windows Build shell makes get one head height (and the windows one sill) where theirs differ by less than this. 0 keeps each as found.
Add doors and windows (on): each new wall is probed through the building every few centimetres up its height. Where nothing of the building stands behind it over a door’s or a window’s size, the wall gets an opening of that size, a door when it reaches the floor. A marked opening makes its own (the mark’s size, as Make openings does). A window still glazed in the building is a wall to the probes: mark it to get its window.

The corners stay after Build: undo and Build shell again makes it again (with other settings), Backspace changes them, and the next corner placed starts a new room. Points and corners are not saved.

Walls fitted to the building

With a walk-in building, the Wall tool and wall-end drags snap to the building’s inner wall faces, so a building off the grid needs no measuring: the wall’s centre line lands half its thickness in front of a face, parallel to it, and corners snap to the corner of two faces. Snap to the building in the tool options (and Shift) frees the pointer.

Fit to the roof sets a full wall’s top from the roof or the floor above (split where the roof bends), and a room whose walls are fitted gets the sloped ceiling.

Warnings to know

Problems reports rooms that reach outside the building, an opening whose cut is still blocked, and one of the game’s own interiors already standing in that building (Michael’s house has two). The Map files tab can replace those; see Editing the building and map files.