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Stripper:Source Guide (Advanced)
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This guide will cover the uses of Stripper in more depth, explain how various entities and mapping elements work and where to use them, practical applications of using Stripper to modify maps, advanced techniques, and how to resolve potential problems or work around Stripper's limitations.
It is highly recommended to read Stripper:Source Guide - Basics first to familiarize yourself with the fundamentals of Stripper, its structure, and its terminology.
Knowledge of Source engine and its entities, and Hammer Editor will also be useful, though not required when starting out.
Ideally, the decompiled versions of Valve's maps should be used for reference and to author your changes before transferring them into Stripper, as for more advanced modifications relying entirely on Stripper dumps and in-game coordinates/entity placement will not be enough.
Entities in the Source engine share a standard set of properties that define key information about each individual instances of the entity.
Almost all entities have these properties, though for some they do not support every property, or it is not relevant to some specific entities. Many entities have their own unique properites which will be covered in later sections.
As mentioned in the basics guide, each property in Stripper is defined by two strings, the key and the value. The key is the name of the property, and must be exact (though case is ignored), and the value can be any valid type of value for that key.
The Valve Developer Wiki is the best resource for finding these properties, along with accurate explainations of what they do and what values they accept. This information is also available in the Hammer Editor.
classnametargetnameparentnamehammeridoriginanglesspawnflagsmodelsolidStartDisableddisableshadows
All non-static entities are capable of receiving inputs from other entities, and sending outputs to other entities.
I/O is a shorthand way of referring to Inputs/Outputs.
The inputs and outputs of each entity varies depending on its type, though there is a standard set that all entities share. There are many I/Os that are also shared between many standard and L4D2-exclusive entities.
This input and output system how entities interact with each other in maps. It is the main method for scripting events and actions in Source engine maps, in L4D2 it is used heavily for things players interact with directly, and things that happen around them in the background. It is a very powerful system that has many possible uses beyond the scope of Stripper's three main functions.
The system works by having one entity send an output upon specific events, another entity can then receive that input and perform an action. For example, when a door is opened, it has an output to make a light entity turn on. An input is just another entity's output.
For a more detailed explaination of how this system works, read this article on the Valve Developer Wiki. A full overview of the system can be found on **IO System category page.
The I/O system has two parts, the event which causes the output to fire, and the actual parameter that defines what the output does.
The event types that can be used depend on the entity the output is tied to, these events occur either naturally through players interacting with the game, or by other entities firing outputs.
For example, a prop_door_rotating can use OnOpen as an output event. This could fire when a player manually opens a door, or when the door receives an Open input from another entity.
"[event name]" "[target entities named],[input name],[parameter override],[delay in seconds],[trigger only once]" "[output named]" "[target entities named],[via this input],[parameter override],[delay in seconds],[trigger only once]"