I’m super anal when it comes to mapping, and I’ve seen a lot of poorly made stairs, so I decided to write a tutorial. I will be making this for Warsow, but the concept is the same in every game.

So you’re making your map and you decide, this shit needs stairs. Maybe so, but I would like to point out that too many stairs is retarded. Lets not have giant flights of stairs in our maps please.

Step One

Find out the dimensions for your steps, or step size. The most common and best working is 8 units high and 16 units wide. This is what I’m going to use in the tutorial (the maximum recommended height in Warsow is 12 units.) Notice where I start with my first step. It is flush with the top floor. Don’t start your stairs one step below.

Step Two

Copy the step you made by pressing space bar, and moving the step into place. Do this until you have a full stair case.

Step Three

Now most people would stop at the last part and call it a day. However these are shitty stairs; make some good stairs. Bust out the clipper (x) and make two points to clip the bottom half of your steps diagonally.

Step Four

Make sure the steps are still selected, and press ctrl+m to make the steps detail brushes. This is how pros do it. It cuts down on compile time, and improves performance. Read about it here.

Step Five

Create a brush the size of the stair case, and clip it to make a backing.

Step Six

Now that you have some pro ass steps, you can hit ctrl+d to toggle detail brushes. Your steps should hide, and show once you press the shortcut. Just a quick way to see if you did it right.

Step Seven

Now you can add some quick lights, or ambient lighting and test them out.

Step Eight

The final step would be to texture the stairs, and caulk the sides. Here’s an example of what a finished set of stairs might look like.

Holy shit, now you can work for id or something.

There are many methods to capture game footage. The method I’m about to explain is  complicated, and if you’re new to this, it might be difficult and frustrating. However, I think it yields the best results in terms of video quality. Much of this is based on what I learned from anX’s CS:S movie guide, applied to Warsow. If you have any problems or want to go more in depth, I recommend also reading his guide.

Software

You’ll also need some software. There’s lots of choice out there, but I’ll go over the more popular ones that I use.

• VirtualDub (Free)

  This is used for taking the captured frames, and making a video file with.

• Audacity (free)

  Audacity is used for capturing the audio. Apparently Warsow is also able to, though I was never successful.

• Sony Vegas Pro (Free Trial)

  Required for combining the audio and video, and rendering the final output. Most video editors are capable of this. If you use Vegas Pro, I recommend version 8 or up.

Movie Config & HUD

It doesn’t need to be anything special, just at least have high graphic settings, and the rest is up to you. Make sure to use a 16:9 resolution. 1280×720 or 1920×1080 works the best. I use 1280×720 for a smaller file size.

Second your cl_demoavifps needs to be a whole number. Warsow doesn’t let you use any number and will auto adjust the setting so the fps is synced with the audio. 50 and 125 are good values. Using a 30 as a value will not work, Warsow will re adjust it to something not whole.

Depending on the project, you might want to use an alternative HUD to the one you play with. If you want no HUD, you can use cg_draw2d 0, which hides the crosshair too. I like to use one of my playing HUDs, or a HUD with just a crosshair and awards. These can all be found on my HUDs page.

Recording

To record the video use the command demoavi while viewing a demo. Use it again to stop recording. I recommend that you make a bind for it in your movie config. Once you recorded one clip, in the basewsw folder, you will have a new folder called avi, with all the frames in it. Don’t start recording again until you moved these, or created a video from them. Recording again will overwrite them.

You should also record audio, do this with Audacity, or Fraps. I use Fraps for capturing audio. I can sync the pictures together better than I can sync the audio to a picture in Vegas Pro

Editing

In VirtualDub, make sure you have colors set to 24bit, and your fps is the value you recorded at. Turn off audio processing. I also don’t compress the video in VirtualDub, I do that later. Open the first frame of the recording, and then save as avi.

Once you do that put it in Vegas, or whatever you use, sync the audio like I mentioned. I usually render clips with no modifications, just the audio sync, this way I have an uncompressed clip with audio included. You can then delete the separate audio and video files, and you have one nice file. This is only really useful for bigger projects, not just a short frag clip. Once you do that with all your clips, you can edit it in any software you want. I use Vegas Pro cause it’s fast and easy. Some of my videos have motion blur, this is done by recording at 125, or 300fps then importing it into Adobe After Effects and using the effect called CC Force Motion Blur.

Important steps to make sure your video is smooth:

• Make absolutely sure “frame blending” is disabled (google how to.) Frame blending causes a kind of ghosting and is usually not desirable.
• YouTube has a 30fps limit. so my final videos are all at 25fps. If you recorded at 50 fps—like I recommend—, just set your project to 25 and it’ll drop every second frame. From my experience recording at 25 rather than 50 makes the video choppier.
• Use a good bit rate, I use around 10mb/s. but some times go lower or higher depending on the length of the clip (so it uploads in a reasonable amount of time.)

These are the final render settings I use in Vegas, but they should be able to translate to any other video software:

• Video Settings
• Audio Settings
• Project Settings

Examples

This video is done using this method, as well as added motion blur in After Effects. Here are a few more examples:

• No motion blur
• High motion blur

Let me know it the comments if this helped you, don’t be afraid to post a link to your video either.