I am not here to teach mapping basics, just here to clear up some of the things I personally wish were documented and spelled out when I started my own projects.

If this guide does well, I will consider expanding it.

Once I've had my fun with this game, I might buy the second and move on because I'm assuming it has a more active modding scene.

The grid in Haydee's editor is deceptively simple.

All created CSGs display this developer texture by default.

In the editor, each square that is visible is 8 units wide.
This means that one of the colored squares that make up the greater grid is 16 by 16 units.

For the purpose of this guide, I will be referring to all measurements in units, so it's important to understand this.

The provided image is 48 x 32 units.

There isn't a whole lot of clarification on what Haydee can actually do, and coming from mapping for the Source Engine this is disappointing.

This documentation needs to exist, so here we go.

All standard doors in Haydee are 32x64 units, but if you're like me and want to know the exact size of Haydee's bounding box, here it is.

• Haydee is 53 units tall.
  
  • A 52 unit tall gap will not allow her to walk through.
• Haydee is 13 units wide.
  
  • Same thing, even one unit smaller will not allow entry.

• Hayde is 19 units tall crouching.
  
  • Same thing, even one unit smaller will not allow entry.
• Her width does not change when crouched.

• Haydee can climb onto a ledge that is a maximum of 64 units off the ground.
  
  • (Shown in picture)

• A ledge that is minimum 21 units high and maximum 36 units high will allow Haydee to automatically climb it.
  
  • This means the player only has to press space once to get up it.
    
  • A ledge that is 37 units high will require Haydee to bend over to climb it, meaning the player has to press space twice to get up.
• A ledge that is 20 units high cannot be climbed up, and instead Haydee will do a normal jump even if there is a climb game element present.
  
  • As with all of these number rules, a ledge that is 21 units high will trigger the auto climb.

• Haydee can fall 64 units without taking any fall damage.
  
  • (max, no dmg, no grab)
• If Haydee drops down and grabs the ledge, she can fall a maximum of 112 units with no damage.
  
  • (max, no dmg, with grab)
• Haydee can survive a fall from 128 units with full health without dropping down to grab the ledge, but she will have 1 circle on her heart clock.
  
  • (max fall, no grab)
• Haydee can survive a fall from 164 units with full health if she drops down to grab the ledge first.
  
  • Same as above, she will live with 1 circle on her heart clock.
    
  • (max fall, with grab)

• Haydee can jump a gap with a maximum width of 88 units without needing to grab the ledge.
  
  • This is hard to make though, so a 80 unit gap is more consistent for gameplay.
  • In my testing, I was able to make a 92 unit gap with no ledge grab, but it feels incredibly precise.
    
  • I could cover the 88 units consistently, so I decided to label it the unofficial maximum.

• Haydee can jump a gap with a maximum width of 136 units with a ledge grab.
  
  • Unlike the previous, I could not make a 137 unit jump no matter how hard I tried.

• Haydee can wade in 41 units of water.
  
  • 42 units of water will cause her to start swimming.

This is just for people like me, who came from an engine like source and was incredibly confused about the way Actors and Components work.


Actors are blank entities waiting for Components.

An Actor with no Components does not do anything. It is a puzzle with no pieces.
The Actor Name refers to the entire object.

A Component Name refers only to that Component, and does not influence the Actor as a whole.
This is an Actor named "Bridge" with a sound component named "Spawn".

Let's assume the sprite is visible during game-play.
If I wanted to disable the entire object, including the sprite AND the sound, I'd disable "Bridge" in the Director Graph.

If I only wanted to disable the sprite when you press a button, I'd address it as "Bridge.Sprite016".

Actor.Component

Because of this, you can do things like disable the collision on a door when you push a button if you wanted to.

A question I've seen too many times, and something I have asked myself too many times when trying to learn Navigation Meshes.

Let's say we have a walker in a cage, and a basic NavMesh setup to account for the door.
In the top left, you're going to select the filled in cursor to bring up a menu like this.

Create a new state, and let's just make it bright red and named it "Blocked" so we know what it does.

Now you're going to select the little section that will act as a kind of "barrier" that the bot cannot walk past, and designate it as a blocked area.

Last thing we need to do is add a "NavBlock" component onto the door. For the source option, fill in the name of the Actor. The state should be "Blocked", or whatever you named your newly created state.

Now, as long as this door is enabled the bot will not be able to walk past the red area we created.
This does mean that even if the door is not in the doorway, the bot will still not move.

Littering your map with the corpses of the Haydees to come before you is a great idea!

Unfortunately the editor is very unintuitive in this area.

To start, it's easiest to just Right Click and spawn a blank Actor.
Give it a PlayerMesh part that will tell the game to use the Haydee model (this also makes it affected by outfit mods).
Give it a Skeleton too.


After you give it a Skeleton, select Haydee's skeleton in the files.

Give the Actor a Ragdoll Component too. If you are going to be manually posing your Haydee, this Component does not matter for you.

Make sure to select her Ragdoll Physics Model in the files, and tick the boxes for what you want the ragdoll to be moved by. "Pawns" mean the player and robots can move the ragdoll by walking into it.

If you're making her a full-blown ragdoll, you can just rotate and position her however you want and press SPACE. This will start a physics simulation, where you can either hit ESCAPE to back out or press SPACE to apply the position.

If you want to manually pose her, hit the icon in the top left that looks like a bone.

To make your life easier, set your gizmo orientation to "Local". To do that, click the house in the top left. On the left you can see Global rotation, and Local rotation on the right.

If you want to give her items, add a Container Component, and an Item Component. You'll need one Item Component for each different item you want.
Here's an example of her having a 1x2 inventory with a single purple keycard, and 10 bullets inside.
IMPORTANT NOTE: For the inventory to work, the Haydee REQUIRES the Ragdoll Component.

Haydee does not support sloped geometry.

Try it for yourself.

Haydee will simply ignore the laws of physics and do this.

No fun, right?

I found a workaround, but it is very jank and taxes your map performance very hard.

Do not do this.

But if you want to, feel free to keep reading.

Haydee's maximum step height is 8 units.

This means she will automatically step up any 8 unit high surface without jumping, climbing or anything.

So we can make a piece of geometry that looks like this:

And just drag those rear 4 point in to make a triangle!

Now you can copy and paste these to make a full slope, and Haydee can actually walk up it!
The camera will still bounce like you're walking up a flight of stairs, but really that's what you should have made instead of this abomination.

Decals are useful and nobody really talks about them and their very useful layering feature.

Here's some useful cases of decals that I've found:
Labeling rooms so the player has an idea of where they are. Mazes are fun, but getting lost is not.

As you saw previously, leaving in-editor developer messages:
Could also be used to make a laboratory setting, with labels to different sectors on the floor or wall like in Half-Life.

Labeling doors and puzzle elements if you have complex designs:
Obviously this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Using custom materials you can carry the decal system very, very far.

How would you make something like this last example?
It's got an outline, a background and a letter.

Here's what it looks like in-editor:
You can see three Decal Components.
The top one is the letter Z.
The middle one is the black outline, and the bottom one is the grey background.

It's all about playing around with their sizes, and especially using the "Move Down" and "Move Up" buttons to control how they render in reference to each other.