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Steam Tutorial

From HalfLife 2 Knowledge Base

This tutorial explains how to use the entity env_steam to create many different effects.

Steps

1. The first step is to construct a basic room. If you do not know how to make a room yet use the following tutorial, Basic Room.

2. Now you need to select the entity tool and place an env_steam entity in your map. Usually you will want the entity to be placed in a location that would actually spew steam, but for our tutorial purposes this is not needed. Now open up the properties of the env_steam (While the env_steam is already good to go to actually produce a visible effect, I am going to now explain what each property does for the entity so you can use it for a purpose.)

Properties:

Parent: What this does is allow you to have an env_steam move with a moving object. So if you placed an env_steam on a train that moved around the map you would want to parent the env_steam to the train so that they move as one. In most cases you will want to leave this blank.

Pitch Yaw Roll (Y Z X): This is used to designate which direction the steam will emit from. All you do is modify the numbers. Example: 0 180 0 points to the left. If you are bad with angles you can use the top right angle circle to help somewhat but it only modifies the Yaw.

Name: This is the name you give this entity. This is only needed when the env_steam is modified via entity I/O system or something is parented to it. But it is always good to name things for reference.

Initial State: This is pretty self explanatory. If you set it to "Off" then the steam wont start on. If you set the steam to "On" then it will start activated.

Particle Type: This is how you choose whether you want smoke steam or heat waves. Be aware that heat waves can cause lag so use sparingly. They cause most lag when the player is close to them so try to keep them from being right in player's faces.

Spread Speed: This is just to give it more randomness or less randomness in how fast the particles travel. Like if you have particles that are going at 25 inches a second then that means some will go at 10 inches a second, and some will go 40 inches a second, and in-between.

Speed: This is how fast the particles will move, Though remember this is also affected by Spread Speed. The default value, 75 is a good value for most purposes.

Particle Start Size: How big the particles will start out when spawned.

Particle End Size: This is how big the particles will grow to before they vanish.

Emission Rate: This is how many particles are created per second. Please not that the more created the more graphics intensive it becomes. In most cases you won’t need to change this value.

Color (R G B): This is how you choose the color of the Normal Particle Type Steam. I suggest just using the color tool to pick the color rather than entering in RGB Values.

Length of Steam Jet: This is not only how long the jet of steam will be, but also how long the particles exist. The bigger the number the longer the jet is and the longer the particles are in existence.

Translucency: How visible the jet particles are. This is used on the Normal Particle type and is used like an alpha channel. 0 means the particles are invisible, and 255 means they are completely opaque.

3. After you set up your env_steam how you would like add a player spawn of either terrorist or counter-terrorist and compile your map.

When you test your map you should have a steam jet of either smoke or heat wave.