What you should know how to do:

Understand the basics of  UnrealED.

Understand the basics of zones. If not, click here.

I like this trick alot. It has been used in some levels I have seen on the net and thought it was worthy of a tutorial. We are going to make a zone that is able to push a player along a predefined axis at a predefined speed. We are going to make it look pretty cool while we are at it!

Fire up UnrealED and build a room that is 512*512*512. Add some lights and rebuild. Make a copy of the room and lights by highlighting them all and clicking Ctrl+W on your keyboard. Move the duplicate room next to the first room and rebuild. You should now have two indentical rooms next to each other. Now we are going to connect the two rooms with a cylinder tunnel. Click the Cylinder Brush button and size up the brush to match the distance between the two rooms. Once the brush is in place, subtract it using the Subtract button. Here is an example:

Try to have the two rooms a good distance apart for a better effect. If you are wondering what all the brown is on the floor in the right room I added a bunch of power-ups and weapons just for fun :) Now let's use a Sheet Brush to seal off each end of the tube. Remember that you can use a regular sheet brush to seal off the end of the cylinder even though they are not the same size. In some instances you will get a HOM (hall of mirrors) effect as a result. If so you can try deleting the brush and start over or move its position on the grid and then rebuild.

I thought adding a texture on the sheet brush would add a nice effect. I chose Fibre13 from the GenFX texture pack. Now click the Add Special button and this dialog box will appear:

Select Zone Portal from the PreFabs drop down menu. Make sure that Transparent, Zone Portal and 2 Sided are checked and click OK. Seal of both sides the same way:

While we are visually spicing things up let's put a cool texture on the inside of the tube and set it to pan in the direction we are going to shoot through. I chose Spacey from the GenFX texture package.

Select every surface in the tube and apply the texture. While they are all still selected, rotate the texture right right clicking and selecting Surface Properties. Browse to the Alignment tab and rotate the texture 90 degrees. On the Flags tab put a check next to U-Pan and Unlit. Rebuild.

Nice! Now the tube is sealed off at each end with a sheet brush and textured. Now I want to shoot from one end to the other as soon as I enter it. This is a simple process. Add a ZoneInfo into the tube. It is located in the Actor Class Browser: Info>Zoneinfo . Lets look at some properties:

I adjusted the Z axis of the ZoneGravity section so that a player in the game will have a smoother ride when shooting through the tube. I kept the default ZoneTerminalVelocity at 2500. The ZoneVelocity is the variable that actually pushes a player in any direction you specify.

X Axis is horizontally North and South. Y Axis is horizontally East and West. Z Axis is vertically up and down.

Now that you understand that you can set the ZoneVelocity. Depending on which way your map is flowing, it may need to be a negative number. I set mine to -8000. I really want to fly through there! I also changed the ZoneGroundFriction to zero just to be safe. Another setting is bMoveProjectiles. Set it to True if you want weapon discharge to be shot through the tube.

One last thing. The speed at which the texture is panning on the inside of the tube is probably to slow. You can speed it up to better match the rate at which you are flung through the tube. In the Advanced Properties of the ZoneInfo look under ZoneLight. Change the value of TexUPanSpeed to 10. I know if you set it over 50 it gets a little buggy.

REBUILD. If all went well then you should be able to shoot into the next room. I copied one zone tube and turned it around so I could shoot back into the first room. The key here is to experiment and have fun.