This helps me alot. I used to just use an extra controller, but you can line this up alot more easily. Can't wait for Foundry. Your maps are going to be sweet. P.S. Can't you just start a new round? It should theoretically work the same way.
So let me get this straight. while you are holding the object in forge, you want to pause the game and save it? Seems like alot of saving and quitting but it will be worth it to make a perfect structure!
I'm glad it was so helpful, this and some of the other forging 101's were actually made by me. The pic is from an unfinished map where I used the techniques in this guide to make a floating powerup wall (you'll later see how this can make for some really unique gameplay).
If you want your floating objects to be exactly where you want, and look like they were carefully and well placed, use the techniques in this forge 101, I usually find it to be faster to do it this way, and it makes sure you do save often.
The other single player method is to simply stack items and then delete the items below it. Obviously this is limiting, but now with the massive boxes available in the new maps, this works out pretty well. There are other floatable items not mentioned which should probably be listed somewhere, such as the bridge, and the man-cannons, for example. Actually, there ought to be a sticky put-up here somewhere that lists every item and identifies it as a floatable, or non-floatable object. Any forge creation that ignores floating stuff is ignoring the whole coolness factor of being in a true 3d environment, plus saving budget by eliminating unneeded items. Anyways, those bridges are the bomb for floating other items in alignment too. I float a bridge and then stack stuff all over it. Once a bridge is "glued" it wont teeter, fall, or bounce like a crate; it's extremely solid, like using a teleporter. So if you set it level, anything you use it to float will stay level. It's also great for setting up ramps.. just tilt it against a big box, and trap the bottom edge from sliding out on you... As soon as it "glues" into place, you can remove the support and stuff, and it ramps out into nowhere... (or maybe into a fusion Core pit if the mongoose/warthog/chopper isn't moving fast enough it's up to you!) Another thing about bridges, I tend to rely on single player techniques and find that an advantage to bridges is that you can build out over terrain that you normally couldn't. For example: On rats nest, I went to where the Pelican Platform is visible, and was able to lay down a bridge that hung out off the cliff. You can either be limited to extending less than half it's length over the edge at a time, or you can extend more of it by using a roadblock (the cement one) on the supported end while positioning the piece (counterbalancing it). If you use the halfway trick, you can also delete the overlapping sections of bridge and re-use them elsewhere without screwing anything up because the gaps are acceptable. The spawn position indicator on a bridge is in the center, which means this technique will allow you to run a bridge almost halfway past the map boundaries (even through kill walls). The only restriction is that the position indicator itself must be within the map area. I discovered this while trying to build a bridge to the Rats Nest Pelican platform by myself. There's a kill wall there, and on one version of my map a player could walk along the bridge and suddenly die and "fall to his death" without ever falling off the bridge, because the bridge went right through that wall. One word of warning though.. if you grab a "magically" floating item in forge, it will fall when you release it. That's why I typically work alone in Forge..
This was written before the new maps release, the only floatable objects not listed are the Foundry objects, which are also floatable (anything that its in Foundry, under scenery, and wasn't in any of the "old" maps).
Actually if you have two people on can drop fusion coils and the other can shoot them with a BR or sniper at appropriate height. When the coil explodes that becomes it's new spawn point. If you have good aim you could probably do this 10 times a minute.
A quick note, using this "new" floating technique, you can place Shield Doors sideways or whichever way you want to, instead of having them straight up or down.
Shield doors are one of the foundry objects. Fusion coils, this is the best way to place them because you want them to fall right. You can set them exact to the right height, spot, and angle to start from. Your falling fusion coils often work better if they instantly explode as soon as they touch the ground (without rolling even a little or anything). You want your fusion coils to start with the long side parrellel to the ground (the side that explodes). The shooting technique, works, and faster, but it doesn't work as well.
so, wait- we'd have to end the game then come back in for EVERY OBJECT? What if we're making something complex, or our scene just has way too much individually floating stuff to do that process without spending a week making a path? would starting a new ROUND work as well? Ah, I may as well test it myself. Thanks for the bit of knowledge, though. This will one-up my arsenal of mapping ability!
That's correct. With this method, starting a new round will not work, only ending the game will keep the object in place. From my experience, it is a very, very tedious process that requires an extreme amount of patience, especially for floating structures. If you use my method, perhaps you can bypass at least some of this tediousness by being able to float objects quickly and easily? Please read the post above, and if you can, DL the file from my fileshare (a good explanation of this is in the fileshare link, but I will post it here for everyone's convenience:
lol since joining this site ive found that many things i thought were obvious really baffle many people