Let us start this blog off by posting my first tutorial! It handles a problem I spent ages trying to solve, but could find no working tutorials for. Click images for closeups.

What this tutorial will do:
Create an invisible activator using a lever and a triggerbox.

And what’s that good foor?
To make a Static appear to be an activator when Nothing Else Works, like:
  - when you want to use a magic effects static as an activator, because those meshes appear to be hardcoded not to be able to replace activator meshes and have the activator still function. So very annoying, ne?



Let us begin!

First you go into your Object Window, you will want to go to
WorldObjects → Activator.

In the Filter box, type in “Lever” like so:

Pick SimpleLever (it doesn’t very much matter which one you pick, but we’ll go with this one for simplicity’s sake) right click on it, and choose duplicate:

You now have a new item in your list, called SimpleLeverDUPLICATE001. This is the lever you’re going to edit. Right click SimpleLEverDUPLICATE001 and choose edit:

An Activator window will pop up- Change the ID to something you know you’ll recognize, I suggest having a naming theme based on your mod. I picked TUTORIALactivator for ID.

For Name, you will want to write the name of the Static you wish to appear clickable. I choose ”Empty Air” becuase there will be nothing there.

The Activate Text Override is less important to change, but can give a sense of uniqueness. I’m writing Touch in mine.

Your activator window should look something like this by now:

Now, there’s a field called Model right under the Name field. If you leave the lever model in there, you’ll get annoying assertions and an error messages upon startup of CK. We don’t want this, so we’re going to clear out that field.

Click Edit next to the field and you should have the Model Data window pop up like so:

It sure is one pretty lever! But we don’t need it, nor do we want it. Click Edit in this window, you should have a display somewhat like this:

I’m in Swedenland, and thus my buttons are in Swedish - Avbryt means Cancel. Click Cancel, and you’ll be returned to the Model Data window, it’ll be empty:

This is good and this is how we want to keep it! To make it so (as captain Jean-luc Picard would have said), you’ll need to click OK first in the Model Data window, and then in the Activator window (as displayed below). This saves your activator without any animations or meshes tied to it.

When the Create New Object pop up prompts you, click No. We already duplicated the Lever, and the original is safe and sound. Click No, and in the Rename Confirmation window:

click Yes.

Good effort! We’re half way there!

What do we have now?
Now we have an activator without a mesh. It isn’t an invisible activator, and it isn’t a marker, it’s just an activator function.

Go into your render window and click the static you want the activating function to be associated with. I’ve picked a mushroom, isn’t it pretty?

It’s no biggie if you don’t get the selection right first time. The trigger box can always be moved after placed.

Speaking of which, we’re now going to put one in – having clicked the little T square in the menu, we get a select form window:

In the Filter section, write the ID of the activator we created before. For me, that's  TUTORIALactivator:

Oh, there it is! We click on it, and then click OK.
And here we have our trigger box surrounding the mushroom:

Looks grand, doesn’t it? But wait! We’re not done yet (unfortunately)!

Now, TriggerBoxes are a bit buggy, as I’m about to explain. They appearantly are not very fond of being Activators, probably because that was never intended to be their purpose in life, or maybe they are just grouchy and deserve no pity for their flaws. I don’t know, I haven’t asked them.

Since this isn’t a documentary on the nature of triggerboxes, I’m simply going to move on with it:

Because of these “quirks”, there are a couple of things you need to do, to get our desired result.

Right click the triggerbox and choose Edit. Find the little tab called 3D data. It should be to the far left in the tab list:

The rotation values are, per default, set to all zeroes. We do not want them to be zeroes. Change all 0.0000 to 0.0001 – it doesn’t have to be a bigger change than that.

Then go to the Primitive tab, which is next to 3D Data:

There’s a little box named Player Activation, that’s unticked. Click it. Click it like your life depends on it:

Ah, glorious.

Now find the tab aaaaaaall the way to the right, called Scripts. I’m going to assume you know how to add a script.

Since I’m an evil person, I’m going to use a script that hurts the player upon activation. I add my script, and I click OK. It is really importan that you click OK regardless of whether you add a script or not, because if you don’t, none of the changes to 3D Data and Primitive will save, and the activator won’t work. So thusly:

That’s it. You’re done! Save your progress, quit the CK, load up the game and:

As you can see, it says “Touch” instead of Activate and “Empty Air” instead of “Lever.”

So the player goes all: I wonder what will happen if I click this thi-

- OW OW OW THIS ISN’T WHAT I SIGNED UP FOR!

And that concludes this, pretty much.


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If after all of this, it still does not work, check the 3D Data and Primitives tabs first. Those are really easy to miss.