6. Connecting rooms
Ok, our room is fairly crowded by now so perhaps its time to add some more chambers to our map. To do this you may want to zoom out of the map a little (use insert and delete while in the plan view). Now create another brush near to our room (but not connected) just like we did in the first chapter of the tutorial (see here). Use the hollow tool to make the walls,floor and ceiling and choose some appropriate textures. You might need to add a light in this room (or alternatively move a light from the existing room).
Now draw another brush cube that will be the corridor that joins the two rooms. Draw it so that the floor of the corridor is one unit above the floor of the two rooms and each end of the corridor crosses into the rooms slightly. Then hit the CSG subtract button (two icons left from the hollow button). This will create holes in the walls of the rooms to match the size of the corridor. To see this you can just move the corridor brush to one side and see the holes visible in the 3D View window. Now to make the corridor itself just move the new brush back into position and hit the hollow button. You can then deselect the corridor brush and remove either end of it (currently blocking the doorways!) by using shift and the left mouse button to select them and backspace to remove them. Select and texture the remaining walls as you see fit.
Recompile the map and check it out in quake. You may notice that the corridor has a small step leading in and out of it. You can adjust the corridor walls and floor to a lower level if you want the floor to remain flat.
This is the basic and most useful way to link one room to another in Radiant and also allows you to make other openings like windows and pits. However it is important to make sure that your map has not open gaps, often known as map leaks. As you may find players can literally fall out of your map and Bots will get very confused indeed. Sometimes mappers will create a larger and uncut box that encloses all the rooms in a map and is covered in a sky or space texture, this helps to protect against leaks and makes map management more easy.
Next we will look at other software that you can use to add to your maps functionality.
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