Crate Crane

An easy to make crane that carries a crate around.

1.Firstly, create a good sized room (300x300x300) and place a info_player_start and a light in there.

2.Create a "rail" that your crane will travel along; let's use an 8 sided cylinder, 16units in diameter, that goes from end to end in the room.

3.Create the crate and the arms that hang it from the rail. You can put this anywhere along the rail; it will be started at your path corner (when we get to that in a minute) so its location in the editor doesn't matter.

4. Apply the func_train entity to the crate and its arms (so its all one group). Give it a "target" of "crane1" and a "spawnflags" of "1" for START_ON.

5. You will need two path_corner entities for the crane to go between. You can have more, so the crane moves along a more complex path, but for this example we'll use two. (Remember, you can have the path_corners trigger things like doors opening so the crane could emerge from an opening door, cross the room, and open another door and vanish beyond. You use the pathtarget key in the path_corner entity for that.) The path_corners always take some placement tweaking; however, the placement for every path_corner/func_train combo is, looking from the TOP view in your editor, the bottom left hand corner, at the lowest point of the brushes that make up the train. (When I did the sample .map for this, it took me 3 tries to get the path_corners in exactly the right places.) Give the first path_corner a "target" of "crane2" and "targetname" of "crane1". The second one gets a "target" of "crane1" and "targetname" of "crane2". Give both a "wait" of "1" for a little pause at each end of the crane's travel.

6. Compile your map and check out your moving crate crane. You will probably have to tweak those path_corners to get it nicely centered on the rail.

Here's an example .map showing the crane.

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