well, finally made one that works... a bit.

so here he is, i called him up and as he (the elevator is called frank, [made out of 30 brushes all as one func_traintrack]
bare with me...) makes his approach, the fence gate slide doors texture starts vanishing. the door opens after frank has stopped. the texture just vanishes flickering, but is ok again after frank stops moving.
so should i use another texture, non transparent,
a model_dynamic instead, or make it a solid brush,
regular slide door ?




so i get in and see that franks floor is some units below target, not even with outside floor. franks settings say ZERO height above track to ride on, and he starts like that, all ok, but then he just drops out after the first ride.
should i play around with the path corners, move them a bit higher, or change franks *height above track to ride on* ? other than 0 ?




frank has a nice spotlight inside but it's not perfect.
from outside it looks ok, but when i walk closer it gets cut off, inside again it works fine. odd ? it's a light_spot with point_spotlight grouped together, and the point_spotlight has parent frank.
the light spot comes out at franks bottom when i watch him from below. how to fix those ones ? i tried light_dynamic, parent frank, but it didnt work. nothing.




so, frank has no doors attached to him.
downstairs doors are open on start.
theres a 2 button switch inside frank with 2 func_buttons.

say we are downstairs, get in, press the upper button:
outputs=
close left door 0 sec.
close right door 0 sec.
move frank forwards.

errors= the doors close but frank wont move. i have to push the same button again.

we go up, frank stops, upstair doors open, all ok
(but for the miss synced floor).
i go back in, push the lower button,

errors= have to push it twice before frank moves.
franks moving sound (hrrrrrm hrrrrrrm hrrmm) starts 4 secs too late.

then, the single func_buttons, 1 for calling frank up and the other down (located both up and down, logically), well the lower one has an output of *startbackwards*, and the upper one *startforward*. this kinda works but not the way i want.
this gives players the chance to interrupt and basically trap anyone inside frank by playing around with both those keys.
whats the proper way to allow one to call frank up or down, only after 5 secs AFTER frank has stopped ?

and is there any list that explains all those outputs ?
"via this input" resume, reverse....... tons of words that would be real nice if they were explained with some examples.
open, close, light on, light of, those may be understood by plain logic but not most of them...

thanks.

whew. That's a lot. I would have experimented with it, but that's a lot like I said. I have no step-by-step on this since I haven't had to make an elevator. But, here are some thoughts for you to look into.

The button timing issue might be too much information for the button. I recommend trying a logic_relay entity to trigger all of your actions from the button. Use the button to trigger the logic_relay.

With every game I have worked on, those path corners often don't line up quite right. It's a matter of moving, testing, moving, testing, wash and repeat.

With the texture issue, my first thought is that the textures are overlapping in some way. Make sure there is only one brush in the door and that a duplicate wasn't accidentally made. If there is no duplicate, then my thought is the model. I recently ran into a shadow issue with models that I can't explain. The shadow from the model looks like a flickering texture. I haven't had to fix it yet so I don't know the cause and solution. Perhaps your light is causing this same shadow effect on the door which is causing your flickering. If so, a new lighting method would be necessary.

try a point light and see if that helps. If not, take a look at glowing textures (http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Glowing_Textures). The idea is that textures can give off light. You could make a new ceiling texture with the lighting built in that might actually work in for all your lighting issues.

Also, try fiddling with your cubemaps. This might be the reason for the bad shadowing (just thought of this as typing).