Part 3 of 3 (the end)   NOTE: Most, but not all, of these tricks will work with First Encounter. But if you see this symbol it means you must have registered the game and received Second Encounter in order to make full use of the tip. “I CAN HEAR EM, BUT I CAN’T SEE EM” More of a Trick than a Trap, but the psychological value of this one is terrific. Enemies can hear you through secret doors. As soon as you fire, they’ll scream their warning and start moving—opening as many doors as necessary to find you. So every couple of rooms, include a secret door that leads to a narrow chamber filled with regular doors and a foe or two. Put a Brown Shirt in the room and watch your player squirm as he tries to figure out where all that noise is coming from after he executes the Brown Shirt.   Figure 9—Guard 2 will start opening doors as soon as Guard 1 is shot; the poor player won’t know where the doors are until he finds the secret door, but he’ll hear… Braver players may take this as a challenge, so make sure your noisemakers are brawny. Foes seem to be able to hear you through entire NETWORKS of secret doors. So you can connect 5 or 6 rooms via secret doors and still trigger the reaction. If you stock everything well enough, your player probably won’t have time to hunt them down—and will have to endure the constant sound effect of doors opening, thus losing an important audio cue relating to what he can see. Of course, if you only have one of these, it can be fairly easy to deal with. If you’ve got 5 or 6… The example above comes from my own level, “Castle Claustrophobia” version 2.0. OTHER REFINEMENTS Decorate with care. Remember to put those little embellishments in your walls every once in a while—it really helps the atmosphere. Keep your quarters close when possible. This helps regulate speed of movement; the engine slws down the closer you get to walls or doors, so if you’re close all the time, you won’t notice nearly as much. It also makes the game more exciting and challenging because of the limited mobility, and close-quarters combat means you REALLY have to be careful not to get hit. A single point-blank shot from a Zombie can do as much 60% health damage, and a blue SS can easily take 30-40% before you can fire back. Be careful not to overdo it, though—if you can’t make it through your own level, you know you’ve gone too far. Make LOTS of secret doors. Even after you win, you can go back and have fun finding things you missed the first time. You know all the secrets of a level you design. So to determine a good par time, practice until you can whiz through, find everything, and take minimal to no damage. Round it to the nearest 15 seconds and set it. Your par should be challenging, but it should also be possible to achieve, given enough practice.   WolfEdit 1.1 only allows you to assign music used by First Encounter to levels you create. If you own Second Encounter you can integrate the extra music, but it takes a bit of work with ResEdit. First of all, open up Second Encounter in ResEdit and take a look at the BRGR resource. You should see an entry called “Music List”. Take a look at it and you should see something that looks like this:   Figure 10—The Music List for an unmodified copy of Wolf 3D: 2nd Encounter It’s the four columns of letters and numbers in the center that we want to concern ourselves with at the moment. See how they’re clustered into groups of 4 characters each? Each group of 4 characters is one “word”, and each word assigns the music for a level. The first word, which should be 0086, assigns the music you hear when you first open Wolf 3D; the second word, which should be 008A, assigns the music you hear between levels. Each word after these two assigns a musical tune to the level corresponding to it’s position in the list. So the third word is the music for the first level, the fourth is the music for the second level, the fifth is the music for the third level, and so on. Now build your level. Make sure you set music from the Get Info box for at least one of your levels; if you don’t do this, you won’t get a “Music List” resource in your level file. When you’re done, make a copy of your file (remember, NEVER use ResEdit to modify a file that isn’t backed up) and take a look at your Music List resource in RedEdit. There’s no point in modifying the first two words, because when you install levels into Wolf3D, WolfEdit automatically resets them. But each level can have any music you want it to have. There are 3 fairly upbeat tunes, introduced on levels 3, 4, and 7. Their words are 0088, 0080, and 0087, respectively. There are 3 fairly downbeat tunes, introduced on levels 1, 5, and 6. Their words are 0085, 0081, and 0082, respectively. The Intro music is 0086, and the in-between music is 008A. So if I had a 4-level game, and I wanted the tunes to go Level 3, Level 4, Level 1, Level 5, my Music List resource would look like this in those four columns in the middle: 0086 008A 0088 0080 0085 0081 Don’t worry about modifying anything else in the resource; ResEdit will figure it all out for you. IMPORTANT! If you hack the Music List with ResEdit, DO NOT open the Get Info window for a hacked level from within WolfEdit. This will reset your values to one of the four that WolfEdit currently supports, and you’ll have to go back in with ResEdit to reset it the way you want it. Have at it, then! This article should have given you enough ideas to put some truly frightening levels together. Have fun, and if you come up with any interesting ideas for Tricks or Traps, drop us a line here at MNJ. Rich "Akira" Pizor is a full-time student at Lewis & Clark college. He was first introduced to the Macintosh in 1987, about the same time he was going through his teen rebellion phase and about the same time his father went to work for IBM...the rest, as they say, is history. :) He's now considered the dorm's official mac.god and spends most of his spare time fixing everyone else's Macs when they break. His hobbies include theatre (both watching and performing), writing, Internet surfing, and generally enjoying life. In addition to MacNet Journal, Rich has written for The Intelligent Gamer and the short-lived MacShareware User, is the major Mac contributor to the alt.binaries.sounds.mods FAQ, and has had a few video game reviews published freelance in GamePro magazine.