Portal 2 modtools

[deadman1]

I just found out that Valve have released modtools for P2. They can be found on the "Tools" tab in Steam and are free to download for PC users.
More info here:
http://www.thinkwithportals.com/blog.php?id=5443

[Art Blade]

thanks for the info, deadman  :) :-X

Going to take a look as soon as I find some spare time for that :)

[mmosu]

I'm going to expect some of you PC jockies to come up with some sweet maps  :-D

[Art Blade]

Like that first test chamber created by Wheatley?  :-()

[mmosu]

Except I want it to say "ART" on the wall - and make it spelled out of companion cubes while you're at it  :-D

[fragger]

 ^+-+ :-X

AND there better be some effing cake!

Thanks for the news, deadman :) Now to screw up my courage to get onto Steam for the DLs... :-\\

[Binnatics]

Great news! I've been thinking a lot allready, but it's gonna be tough to make something worth playing I guess.
But I'll check it right away!!

[Binnatics]

It ain't easy. Took me about an hour to create a single square 'room' with textures to the walls and ceiling and so. Don't even know if these walls are 'portal-ready'. Well, anyway, the program to build 'source-ready-environment' is in fact not too difficult to manage. It's just a horrible lot of w%&k!!!  :o

Edit: Okay, I created an entriepoint for the player and a portalgun ;) Also a moving door (it moves up once you touch it) and I managed to get in using Portal 2. I could create portals as well, but it gave me an errormessage. Anyway, the portals were functional, so don't know whether to pay attention to it.

At my first try to load the map it was ***Leaked***
Inside source-engine-modders wil know what that means :P

I found out that I used a non-solid texture to one of my walls, that was the problem ;)

It's cool, I'll go on learning, and in a week or two I might introduce my first map to the site ;)

[Binnatics]

Here's an impression of my first built room ;)
[smg id=3306 width=500]

[fragger]

Can't wait to see what you can come up with, Binnatics :) As long as you don't make it too much of a chore for yourself, though...

Me, I'm too chicken to tangle with Steam in case it starts something I'll regret, i.e. interminable upgrades to my existing games (makes warding-off cross with fingers) :-\\

[Art Blade]

"Leaked" means a game area that needs to be closed hermetically has at least one hole that opens to the outer space. If it was a liquid, then diving through it would result you to fall into endless space (simply put: leaving the game area).

Keep it up :) Maybe I can make up my mind and get my head around it soon. Right now I'm not in a creative mood ;)

[Binnatics]

Announced earlier but coming available the 8th of may:

http://kotaku.com/5851007/valve-tinkering-with-an-excellent-portal-2-feature-that-talks-back?tag=portal

Looks a lot better than the first beta version, which was a bit too complicated to me.
This might do the trick ;)

[Art Blade]

should you ever get to modding P2, please let us know how it goes :)

[Binnatics]

I will. I think it will be better than the first beta, but will never conquer the SP campaign ^-^ :-X

[Dweller_Benthos]

"Leaked" means a game area that needs to be closed hermetically has at least one hole that opens to the outer space. If it was a liquid, then diving through it would result you to fall into endless space (simply put: leaving the game area).

Keep it up :) Maybe I can make up my mind and get my head around it soon. Right now I'm not in a creative mood ;)

Ahhhhh, the good ol' HOM (Hall of Mirrors) or BSP error (does it look like an ugly repeating texture, or Hall of Mirrors effect in Portal, like it does in some other game engines?). I remember getting these waaayyyy back when in the days of DEU (Doom Editing Utility), yes the original Doom. Talk about an unfriendly map editor <shiver>. Sometimes you could never get them closed, so you tried to minimize them by changing the geometry just slightly so that the vertices would maybe line up just right so you didn't get that effect. Of course, it's also the source of the term "Fell through a hole in the map" as it's a spot where there's no collision and you can just walk right through into the unconfined area outside the universe.

FC2 has tons of them if you get into an area you're not supposed to be, some of them you don't even need cheats to get to. Found that out about 20 minutes into my first play through.

[Art Blade]

I don't know if Binnatics had a HOM as he just said "leaked" was the problem and modders/mappers knew what it meant. I remember those hall of mirrors all too well, I too did map editing with doom and DukeNukem3D (old one) and QuakeII and HexenII and more.. lol

[Binnatics]

I found it kind of amazing that a tiny hole in the level 'shell' would cause the PC to go nuts. As if this shell, the structure, is protecting the logic from the illogical endlessness of outer space :)

[PZ]

FC2 has tons of them if you get into an area you're not supposed to be, some of them you don't even need cheats to get to. Found that out about 20 minutes into my first play through.

I remember D_B was the master at finding these holes  :-()

[Art Blade]

he'd probably play golf exceptionally well, too. Dweller "Tiger" Benthos.  :-()

[Dweller_Benthos]

LOL. Only can find map holes, I'm afraid, I'm pretty useless on a golf course. I usually end up just picking up the damn ball and dropping it in. And that's mini golf, I think I'd lose my sanity if I tried full size golf.

They are weird, in FC2, there is no visual effect, just there's nothing there. Well, the texture for the ground is usually there, it's just there's nothing to stand on. In Doom, at least, because there was nothing there, the video display would just repeat whatever was next to it, hence the hall of mirrors effect. I don't recall having the same problem in the original Duke 3D, but I do remember it was a pain in the neck to make mirrors, because you had to have as large a space on the other side of the mirror as you did on the player side and the game would duplicate and flip everything on the player side to make it look like a mirror. Weird. Plus going underwater meant you teleported to another section of the map where the physics were different.

[fragger]

Mark Twain called golf "a good walk spoiled". My game is basically a bushwalk with an occasional ball hit :-() Actually, my last game was pretty good, I managed to stay on the fairway all the way around and it would have been a great game if I hadn't kept messing up my putts :D

I too remember the Hall of Mirrors effect, it was like a kaleidoscope on steroids :-D I did once find a hole in the original Tomb Raider, there was a place where I could get Lara to jump into a void. The play area would disappear and Lara would whizz off into the distance and be suspended in a black nothing, and although she wasn't frozen she would only move on the spot. There was no way of getting her back, a reload was required.

The old Duke3D editor (Build) was much more user-friendly than Doom's as in addition to being a 2D grid-style editor it also allowed interactive 1st person editing. Interactive to an extent - you had to create the sectors (rooms, halls - the basic floor plan) on the grid but once you'd done that you could jump straight into the level in 1st person mode and raise and lower floors and ceilings and apply textures and see the changes immediately. One big limitation was that you couldn't have one or more floors directly above or below others, i.e. there could be no criss-crossing or overlapping of the play areas when viewed in the 2D grid part of the editor.

I'm guessing that the reason for having to duplicate rooms for use as mirrors in Duke3D was that it was easier and less CPU intensive to do it that way, as opposed to ray-tracing reflections in the "glass" with the massive number-crunching that involves (there was no graphics acceleration in those days, it all had to go through the CPU). It was probably a similar story with the underwater areas. As I recall, the water surfaces had no transparency whatsoever in Duke3D, they were always opaque with textures on them, for the same sort of reasons as for the mirrors - way too much processing would have been required for proper transparency. It was also possibly easier to employ the underwater physics set in a separate area of the map away from everything else.

But Build was a fun editor to use, and possibly the easiest FPP game editor of them all to use :-X