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Tutorial: Building Basics

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TUTORIAL: Building Basics

We get a lot of people asking for practical pointers to begin building. At the end of this tutorial, you should be able to start building and manipulating objects in your own phase. If you're new to building and wonder how it's done, this tutorial is for you. Building in Epsilon is done by sending commands to the server in the in-game chat module, or via addons. Commands you need to enter are marked 

like this

Parts in brackets <like this> require your own input. Shorter alternatives follow behind a | sign but are identical.
Once you master the basics, it's time to move on to Advanced Building.

Contents:
1. Your own phase
2. Getting into your phase
3. Choosing a zone
4. Preparing the zone
5. Picking an object
6. Spawning an object
7. Selecting an object
8. Moving an object
9. More manipulations
10. Extra resources
11. Advanced techniques

If any of the steps are unclear, incorrect or incomplete, be sure to leave a reply or contact me on Discord or simply ask the #building channel for help.

1. Your own phase

First of all, you'll want your own version of the game world to start building in. Go ahead and make your own phase with

 .phase create <name>

Enter a name for your phase and voila! Your very own playground. You can always rename it later, so don't worry too much about this yet.

2. Getting into your phase

Every time you log into the game, you'll end up in the main phase. To quickly return to your own, do

.phase own | .ph own

You'll also notice the phase has a number or ID now. Your friends can now enter your phase by using the command

.phase enter <number> | .ph e <number>


3. Choosing a zone

Secondly, let's find a place to start building in. Try out the command

.lookup tele <name> | .lo t <name>

and find an area you want to teleport to. Let's try 'Uldum' and press the [Tele] link the chat printed out for us.

WoWScrnShot_081920_232239.thumb.jpg.2b6233fa17a2be17f347254cc9ff3f8d.jpg


4. Preparing the zone

You could just start building now, but Epsilon has a neat trick up her sleeve. Try

.phase shift doodads zone off

and see everything but the terrain disappear. If you'd like to turn the doodads back on, simply reverse with

.phase shift doodads zone on

If you also want the detail clutter gone as well, such as sprigs of grass and flowers, add the following:

.phase shift detaildoodad map -1 -1

Great, now you can start building! Let's keep the doodads off for now.

WoWScrnShot_081920_232246.thumb.jpg.47a9569a392c2fdd76bc54175d8f1c8a.jpg


5. Picking an object

Now we'll decide on what to build. Let's settle on a small troll settlement. Who -doesn't- love sand trolls, right? To make things easier, we'll use a popular model viewer to select our object. Open https://wow.tools/ in the browser of your choice and click Models at the top. A button on the left opens a filtering menu. When you type in 'troll' in the search bar, you'll notice 72 pages of troll objects to spawn. Feel free to look around and click a few. For this tutorial though, have a look at "troll_hotel01.wmo". Let's build on of those!

Tip: The first page has objects that all end in .wmo but as you flip through the result pages, you'll notice ones that end in .m2 as well. The biggest difference between these is that .wmo objects (which are usually buildings or more complicated objects) don't do well with scaling. If you would make our troll hut twice as big, you'd be able to walk right through it because its collision doesn't scale along.

6. Spawning an object

To spawn an object, we need to look it up again, but this time on the server. Use

.lookup object troll_hotel01 | .lo obj troll_hotel01

There's our troll hotel. Let's find a nice big flat area on the cliff above and press the [Spawn] link in the chat output. Tadaaa! A troll hut. Sunken into the ground.

Tip: You could look up objects here right away, but unless you know what they'll look like, it's probably a better idea to use a model viewer first.

WoWScrnShot_081920_232343.thumb.jpg.fec0a278f717936884dcf169c07eee52.jpg


7. Selecting an object

The troll hut is stuck in the ground. To move it, we need to first select it, then pass a move command to it. Since it's the last thing we spawned, we have automatically selected it. To come back to it later, use

.gobject select | .gob sel

to select it again. This finds the closest object to your character. When you have several objects close to each other and can't seem to be able to select it, have the game give you a quick list of nearby objects with

.gobject near <range> | .gob near <range>

The range is optional, but useful if you want a list of a very specific range around you. This list shows you a [Select] link for the objects in your vicinity.

8. Moving an object

You can move an object along 3 axes, so in 6 directions in total. Let's try moving the troll hut up by 4 yards using

.gobject move up <distance> | .gob m u <number>

with distance 4 and the result is immediate. Looks better already, right? To move it any other direction, use

.gobject move down <distance> | .gob m d <distance>
.gobject move forward <distance> | .gob m f <distance>
.gobject move backward <distance> | .gob m b <distance>
.gobject move left <distance> | .gob m l <distance>
.gobject move right <distance> | .gob m r <distance>

The directions are relative to the way the object is facing. Do a

.gobject go | .gob go

to take the place and orientation of the object to find out which way it's 'looking'.

Tip: Distances can be very precise. If you find you want to get it -just- right, feel free to go decimal! .gob m r 0.002? No problem! You can also use the move command without any direction or distance. That way, the object will come to the location of your character.

Tip: There's also an addon for moving objects called Object Mover. See if you can find it in the stack of buttons around your minimap.
               
9. More manipulations

It's time for a party to celebrate our first object. Time to build a troll drum. Because you're a really creative person, you don't want to just use a premade drum. You want to build your own. You can start out with a large barrel, put it on its side and then see about enhacing it a bit more. Go ahead and spawn karazahnbarrel01.m2 inside the troll hut.

Well done, but it's a bit small. Time to scale it using

.gob scale <scale> | .gob sc <scale>

A scale of 2.5 should do it in this case. 1 is usually the starting scale, so 2.5 makes it 250% of the size. 0.1 would have made it 10% of the original size.

Now that you have your big drum, we can flip it over. Just like movement, this can be done on three axes. We can turn it left and right, tilt it sideways and forwards/backwards. These are the commands:

.gob roll <degrees> (sideways tilt)
.gob pitch <degrees> (forwards/backwards tilt)
.gob turn <degrees> (left/right turn)

If you do .gob roll 90 on the barrel, it'll be rolled sideways and you can move it upwards to get it out of the floor. Not going the way you want? Try with negative values to make it roll/pitch/turn the other way. Now we have our barrel on its side, well done. It's party time!
 

WoWScrnShot_081920_232401.thumb.jpg.a175a9b76e193c58d0149c32443f29f5.jpg


If you want to make a second object of an existing one, you don't need to go through spawning and manipulation again. Simply use

.gob copy <direction> <distance>

where the direction is one of the six you also use for moving objects. For example, .gob copy f 4 makes a second rolled over barrel 4 yards in front of the existing one. This is particularly handy when using building tiles, which are objects you can piece together seamlessly to create floors, walls and ceilings too.

10. Extra resources

Have you heard of malls? Malls are phases where people bring together themes objects. There's a tile mall with most of the tile objects in Epsilon. There's a mall with trees, too. Check them out some time using

.ph e 26000


11. Advanced techniques

These are the basics of building. When you feel ready for more, go to Advanced Building to get into blueprints, teleporters, and more.
 

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