A medium-length, medium-hard difficulty map with lots of custom textures, as well as a custom layered music track composed by vanSulli.

Credits:
p0rtalplayer - Mapping
Colossal - Textures
vanSulli - Music
Groxkiller585, Colossal, vanSulli - Playtesting

TWP download also includes 5 screenshots and van's compilation of the music layers into one track.

File Name: Photonic.zip
File Size: 70.44 MiB
Click here to download Photonic

I crashed everythime I had a cube, a sphere, and the laser catcher activated at the same time.
(I could give you the crash dump file if you want)

spongylover123 wrote:
I crashed everythime I had a cube, a sphere, and the laser catcher activated at the same time.
(I could give you the crash dump file if you want)

Hmm...the world portal is activated when that happens. Have you experienced problems with world portals before? Were you getting any type of lag?

no, world portals work fine for me, I disabled and reenabled them in the impossible space.
Nevermind: I found out it was sixense, Valve's dlcs break everything.

I loved this map when I playtested, it was so much fun and unique! 5/5!

Really cool map! I really like the look and the puzzles were pretty good. Second one felt really pointess and it didn't take me a minute to solve even on my blindrun. Textures, sound and everything else were awesome.

Once I got stuck between doors one door before the button on my way back in the first chamber. Also I was pugged by constant frame rate drops. I've never have experienced anything like that in other maps and it started to get annoying.60-120 fps for the most of the time but it occationaly dropped to ~10 for a while.

Still I enjoyed atmosphere so much I think the map is worth 5/5.

I forgot to record my blindrun so I decided to record a speedrun. It didn't work that well because of the frame rate drops but here it is:
Tc1eoiH6v8o

Very nice!

I don't know if this was correct, but: In the first room when you want to enter the lightbridges/doors area, I fired one portal above the entrance so that it catches the laser. i then had to go through this portal carefully to drop into that entrance. That was slightly tedious because obviously the laser was in the way.

In the last room, I somehow managed to glitch out the fizzler. It just stayed turned off even without the cube on its button. When I placed the cube on the button and removed it again, the fizzler worked as intended again. I wasn't able to reproduce it afterwards. Maybe it was just a random bug.

The map is really awesome and fun. The music was nice! . One of the best maps i have played in portal 2. Are you going to create new maps? have you created other maps?

I had a little lag playing this map but only a little.
I think that the last challenge should be harder or bigger than the first one. The second challenge is a relax. The first was the best -- well done !

The reason for the second room is my playtesters thought I should introduce the fling used in the third room. I kinda just stuck a puzzle in there, but it wasn't very hard! Guess I shoulda spent more time on it.

I do plan to make more maps in this style, but first I need to figure out how to get the textures to a small enough filesize to fit on the workshop. As of now, you can't upload maps above 100 MB.

As for the lag, I'm aware of it but I don't know the exact reason why. My transitions aren't exactly brilliantly handled (they use world portals, and while you're in the middle both rooms are rendered) but I was also getting some framerate drops outside of the transitions as well. Guess I need to learn more about optimization

Thanks for the feedback though!

First room: awesome.
Second room: useless. You don't have to introduce that fling for the third room. You even do this kind of fling in the original Portal 2. I would remove it.
Third room: very nice.
Music: Cool when you listen to it for the first time; alright when you listen to it a second time; annoying if you hear it over and over again (maybe I was just too slow ).

Definitely one of the better maps. Thanks for creating.

Edit: Oh, and the difficulty is nowhere near hard. Maybe it is medium (maybe even easy-medium).

I finally got it working and this map has great aesthetics.
Secondly, I agree with Senf, the psuedo-forward fling, didn't need to be introduced. It was easy to use and very self-explanatory.
On the third room, my frame rate dropped 40% of the time while producing a fling and I found out there were no hints.
I also recommend to optimize it in the next update.
The music got very repetitive after awhile and I recommend making alterations of it, like the music introduced in underground aperture.
Here's my playthrough.
sYoUQrxvI14

Hey, its the musician here.

p0rtalplayer has kind of worked around a lot to get layered music to work in the first place without scripts. What he was able to pull off is pretty impressive as far as hooking all the i/o up properly. That being said:

Originally, I had composed the music to be dynamically layered rather than to simply add or remove a layer in each puzzle. Therefore, every layer would've been a little quieter. The final laser in the first room and the laser in each subsequent room would play the laser's theme whenever it was powered, and the gritty theme you hear in the last room would've come from the general vicinity of any light bridge. However, getting all of this to sync up properly using i/o in Hammer rather than scripts was basically impossible, so p0rtalplayer had to improvise.

I agree that it got repetitive really fast, too. By the time I finished the first room, I had to mute my speakers in order to preserve my sanity, aside from unmuting it every so often to, for example, go bananas.

Another great map. thanks for creating, everything worked fine and I enjoyed the puzzles...although the music track was a bit annoying after a while, kind of like an old Nintendo game track....

Just downloaded and I'm going to play through asap. However, the lag was pretty severe throughout this map for me! According to cl_showfps my framerate was fine (excellent, even!) but the game itself felt slow - as I turned myself round with the mouse, I could see the portal gun viewmodel rotating at a delayed rate.

I think I can tell you what causes the lag too: lasers! In the console, I did ent_fire env_portal_laser Kill (cheats on) and after that the map was immediately lag-free. Of course, the puzzles were insoluble then!

Anyway, maybe there are too many lasers on at one time or something? Just thought I'd pass on the info.

I recommend, when the player transitions to the next room, and he/she can't go in it again, kill everything in the previous in the room you can find.

I also recommend adding areaportals.

spongylover123 wrote:
I recommend, when the player transitions to the next room, and he/she can't go in it again, kill everything in the previous in the room you can find.

I also recommend adding areaportals.

Equally, turn off the stuff near the end of the map when the player spawns; turn it on when they get there!

It's a shame.. I'd really like to get into this map, but at some point in the last 2-3 updates, my PC decided it couldn't handle more than 3 lasers in a level.. even if they were active, but nowhere on screen. From what I've played I'd give it a 4-5 just for reminding me of chocolate

I enjoyed the first room quite a bit, the second doesn't count, and I was annoyed by the third. It is clear that a lot of work went into making this, but the end result was less than satisfying. I give it 4/5, despite the following long list of criticisms:

1. Custom textures are great, but reversing the portalability sense of the walls was not a good choice
2. The custom indicators looked nice, but lacked the x/check marks, so they weren't an improvement
3. The first room was rather bright, which it would have been less so if the wall colors weren't reversed. On the big plus side, it is much easier to see where a laser hits a dark wall.
4. Lag, as mentioned
5. Music, as mentioned
6. Lasers in tight quarters. Why do mappers insist on putting lasers right next to walls? I died twice playing this because the f*ing laser pinned me to the wall.
7. Using spheres when cubes would do. I hate trying to drop cubes or spheres into receptacles when there is time pressure. Superbuttons are much more forgiving.
8. Pack custom content into the .bsp, please. It's annoying to track down all those files when you want to delete a map (not this one, though, it's a keeper)

Just to note: in one of the more recent updates, Valve seem to have fixed the performance issues with lasers, and the map is now vastly more playable.

Holy shit, this map is amazing. Great work on those laser puzzles, p0rtalplayer.

iCoLxhdo4WA

in terms of creativity and gameplay, this map was flawless. Good job. I have to comment on two technical problems though:

- Several frame rate drops.I really never had such intense lagging in any other map I ever played, I'd consider my computer as good (ca. one year old)
- Your music got redundant very soon and started to nag me a bit.

I really liked the start and ending. coll idea.

I liked this one a lot. The style was nice, the fact you could only put portals on the dark walls was a bit confusing at first but I got used to that quickly.
The puzzles were good, not too difficult, I only got stuck a short time in the last chamber cause I didn't know you can put an edgeless safety cube on a button. I expected they would roll off, given their tendency to roll everywhere even if you put them down gently.
The second puzzle was way too simple though. Introducing the fling was not a bad idea, I think, but maybe you could've added some laser relays to make things a bit more difficult or something like that.
The music was good but there only seemed to be enough of it for 1 chamber, it got quite repetitive.
I strangely enough didn't notice any lag, which is strange since this computer is not really high-end and lags rather quickly.
To be short, I had a lot of fun with this one, keep mapping!

Bit late here, but I haven't been keeping up with TWP so much lately.

First off, thanks for the awesome video review, wstrika! And everyone else who said they liked it, I did put a rather lot of work into it.

Second, I'd like to explain a couple of my decisions while making the map.
So, what's the deal with the reversed textures? That concept was actually something I was experimenting with a looooooong time ago in Portal 1, using Colossal's confinement texture pack. In fact, I first used the concept in Ad Hoc, which I believe is on this site somewhere. In that map, there was a relaxation-vault like area that you end the map in, presumably in some sort of new wing of aperture. I was planning a sequel to that map called Ad Infinitum, which would use the reversed textures and feature heavy fling puzzles. That map was cut short, however, by the announcement of Portal 2. Skip a couple of years, and I still had the map sitting around unfinished. I didn't particularly like the puzzles, but I loved the visual aesthetic. So I decided to reuse it in a Portal 2 map, and I got vanSulli on board with the music.

The map's difficulty curve is more of a lack of a decision than anything else. Basically, I made a couple PTI puzzles just to block out what you'd be doing in the map, and then made them into more or less the rooms you see now. The second room, as I explained before was an afterthought and as such doesn't really fit in very well.

I recently attended a game design summer workshop at Digipen, and I learned a lot of things there that I think would have made this map better. For one thing, I throw the player into the first room with no introduction of the reversed textures, at all. In the original portal 1 map I mentioned, I had you start in a relaxation vault with no portalgun, and had a small room that forced the introduction of the portalability of surfaces. Second, the map's difficulty/interest curve is nowhere near what makes a good map. I start with a hard puzzle, have a super-easy one in the middle, and then end hard again, where I should start with something easy, ramp it up, and then ramp it up again.

Finally, for the lag and optimization problems, all I can say is that I didn't personally experience them, and the only one of my playtesters that did usually has terrible framerates anyway. I will attempt to use areaportals and such to better advantage in future maps, so thanks for the feedback.

tl;dr: I made some bad decisions along the way, and also this map was originally a portal 1 idea.

I didn't find the music annoying at all. Loved the map, had no problems with it.

5/5 from me.