I won't repeat the business about 8 dummy monsters again. If you want to hear it, look at level 3 (The Gauntlet).

One other trick here will probably go completely unnoticed to even the best mapmakers. Mostly because it's a bug compensation, so the trick enables something to work as you'd expect it to rather than screwing up. See if you can find it before reading on!!

Okay, here it is: if you've done enough map design, you will probably have learned that switches don't work if the space they're in is more than 2 world units high. Figure it out yet? Remember that elevator that decends deep into the ground? Well, why does the switch work to bring it back up again???

Well, technically that's irrelevant, since a door actually triggers things (the poly in front of the elevator switch is a door), though the problem does seem to be related. It seems that doors suffer from a similar problem when they don't close all the way. I can't figure out an exact measurement for how far is too far as I've gotten different behaviors with the same numbers at different times. But the bug is there, so we must deal with it.

Remember that if you've got stacked triggers, as in this case, if the frontmost can't be triggered when you try it, the engine will try the next one. In this case, though, the next one is a switch that suffers from the bug as well. The solution? Hide a switch at the bottom, in an alcove of a height that won't cause problems, BEHIND the two platforms that make up the elevator switch! Then, when the engine fails to trigger both the door AND the first switch, it'll hit the second switch, thus triggering the elevator to go back up. To the player, though, there doesn't seem to be much to it. The elevator behaves exactly as expected.

Too bad I didn't discover this when I was making Edison Awakening (level 7). This bug made me give up on a controllable three-floor elevator there. And I can't add it now, as Edison Awakening uses all 1024 polygons available! Sure, I could probably swing it somehow, but why fix it if it ain't broke, right?

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