PostED - Adding Coronas

Coronas are effects that you can apply to lights, things like lens flares or light rays. Here's an example of how a scene can look with and without the effects.

No coronas, each lamp has only one entity.

Has coronas, each lamp has three light entities. 

Setting up coronas is really easy to do. Open up a light entities properties and go to the Lighting tab, once there set the Corona bool to True. 

Corona = True

You also may want to set the light radius to 0. I can only think of a few instances where you would want the lights these effects attach to cast light.

Anyway, to set a texture to be used for the corona effect, go to the Display tab and add a skin.

Skin added

One you have a skin added you'll want to set it to a texture. Depending on the game you're modding for there should be a package that contains a bunch of lens flare effects. For Postal 2 this package is GenFX.

A lot of nice lens effects.

One you have the texture you want set your light entity should have a little effect around it like this. 

Nice bulb

And you're done, all you need to do now is position is somewhere in your level. It really is a pretty easy effect to add to lights, takes almost no time at all.

PostED - Custom Textures

I use Gimp so I'll be using it for this tutorial. You can download Gimp here; you'll also need to download a plug-in to create .dds images, it can be found here.

The first step in creating a texture for use in PostED is to have a picture be compatible for importing into engine. This just means making sure the image resolution is a power of 2, so 128x128, 256x256, 512x512, etc. I think the maximum resolution the engine can handle is 2048x2048, I may be mistaken though.

Anyway, once you have your image ready open it in Gimp. Next go to File>Export as, and rename the file to whateveryouwant.dds.

Once you click export a window like this will pop up

In these settings set Compression to BC1/DXT 1. If you're creating a texture with transparency set it to  BC3/DXT 5.

Make sure to set the Mipmaps tab to Generate Mipmaps. These control the lod the texture will have at distance. Not Generating Mipmaps usually just makes the texture look really aliased and harsh. As seen below.

Once you have your texture exported go into PostED and open the texture browser. It's the button at the top that looks like a picture frame. Once you find it go to File>Import and import your texture. A window like this will pop up.

Name the Package tab to "Mylevel". Setting it to this makes it so your texture is saved into your levels file, meaning that if anyone ever downloads your level your texture will be downloaded with it. 

Name the Group tab whatever you want. This tab is for texture organization, if your importing a wall texture you should name the group tab walls. It helps a lot in the long run.

The Name tab can be set to whatever.

As for the options you don't really have to do anything for a regular texture, maybe set the Surface Type if you want your texture to have specific walk sounds. If you we're importing a texture with transparency you'd check the Masked box and set Compression to DXT5

Once you've set up everything you want your texture should be ready for use in game.

PostED - Level Transitions

Linking two maps in PostED is pretty easy.

Add a Map Exit actor to the first map you want to link. The Map Exit actor is found under the Special Actor tab. In order for the Map Exit to work the player must touch it, so make sure that it's somewhere the player can reach.

Now, open the properties of the Map Exit actor and go to the Teleporter tab.

Click the tab that says "URL". This is were you type the name of the map you want the player to teleport to. The map we want the player to teleport to is "Transport2", so type Transport2# into the URL field. The hash-tag is required at the end of whatever level you're linking too. Be sure to substitute the Transport2 map name for whatever map you're linking too.

If you linked the maps correctly, then you should teleport when you reach the area you put the Map Exit actor at. You also need no special actor teleport in the second level, just a player spawn.