Update: v1.3 Released

A short but sweet Test Chamber in a forgotten corner of the Aperture Science Test Facility. The first in a series of Zeta Area Chambers that may or may not be trapped within a collapsing valve-time zero-point singularity bubble.

Theme: Clean (mid-construction).
Elements: Lasers, Toxic Slime, Panels, Repulsion Gel.

This chamber has a definite "right" solution but it can be solved in a few different ways, for those Portal Ninjas out there!

Installation instructions included in archive.

Screenshots:

http://is.gd/ueSHIa
http://is.gd/aN75Oh
http://is.gd/kCclm2

#=========================
ChangeLog v1.3:

Added measures to prevent hard crash caused by 'Erase' gel interacting with Water Hazard brush.

=========================
ChangeLog v1.2:

Added additional, additional lighting.
Modified various Indicator Lights for clarity
Additional Water "Safety" Panels added
Safety Panels are now 37.2% Safer. Promise.
Additional Panels added to 'Pit' area for easier access after first solution
Fixed lack of clipping that allowed player to jump into drain pipe area

========================
ChangeLog v1.1:

Added additional lighting.
Misc I/O Changes.
=========================#

File Name: sp_zeta_01_01_v1_3.zip
File Size: 5.62 MiB
Click here to download Test Area Zeta: Chamber 01

Impressive skill display, such abundance of moving parts makes it believable to really be trapped into a machine. Puzzles make intelligent use of space (and none too hard); on paper it may look short, but any experimenting easily pushes it to medium.

Quite dark in places.

Cool, thanks for the solid feedback!

I'll look into adding a bit more lighting for the next revision! The entrance hallway was left a bit dark intentionally to give it a bit of a initial claustrophobic/apprehensive feel but it sounds like that may not have quite worked out so I'll brighten things up a bit there.

Were there any other areas you noted that were disproportionately dim?

This is actually my first released map so hearing "impressive skill display" is quite a pleasant confidence boost.

I used to do a bit of mapping for TFC back in the day, but considering that was 12 years ago I'm not sure it still counts.

The parts around the starting area were the darkest, but even then others in the shade seemed darker than usual. Others might find it annoying, but to me it's no problem.

Update: v1.1 Released

I started playing custom maps and record me playing them. It's neither a perfect run nor do I have to have solved the map in the way it's meant to solve it. I play the maps "blind", that means I've never been in them before and play them for the very first time. I also give a little feedback for the map in the video description.

Maybe you are interested in the fact, that I played your map: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FIKt2tk0zA

Neat! Thanks, that's really helpful.

Perhaps I just have my brightness up higher than the norm, I definitely agree that it looks really dark on your machine. v1.1 has some additional lighting in the Entrance Hallway but I've noted quite a few additional areas from your video that look like they could use some love. I'll tweak it a bit more for the next release (Post-contest of course).

I'll also look into modifying the indicator lights a bit since you noted you were a bit confused by them.

Gameplay Notes:

• I found it pretty interesting that you skipped the 'cube shooter' switch at the beginning of the chamber. I was expecting most players to play with that a bit first before moving onto solving the 'pit' area.
  
  Probably has to do with the fact that the Gel dispenser is at the end of the hallway as you enter so it caught your eye first. I'll try to tweak that a bit to highlight the switch, may be another lighting issue.


• Sorry for your trouble with the 'below pit' death and subsequent loads. There are actually a few auto-save checkpoints in the map that might have helped out with that, I wonder if I can make those more obvious when they save.


• I liked the way you got the cube out of the pit initially. Clever! I'll look into adding some portal bumpers to make that easier since you shot a few times at one point without the portal opening immediately.


• I'm glad you figured out the 'pit' solution without too much difficulty! That was one of the areas I was a bit concerned about people having some unnecessary trouble with. There are a few portal orientation entities in there to help out and it looks like they worked well.

Very nice map. great use of moving platforms and nicely twisted puzzles. I found it a bit taxing at first with exactly what to do but once it clicked it was a good challenge until the last bit where i completely forgot about the gel

Once i coated the pit panels i lined up a portal and jumped into the watered floor. By some fluke i cleared the entire level. It struck me I could do this from the start and put together a video of my badly done speed run.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6l8uJLN7Yw

Very nicely done!

You definitely figured out one of the two 'ninja' methods of completing the level! I thought it was pretty interesting how you gained momentum to get up to the top apex for the jump, but it was executed well.

There's one other way (that I know of at least) to subvert the 'full' solution puzzle, but this method is definitely the fastest.

Thanks for the comments, it's always really interesting to watch how other people take this on.

I had alot of fun with this one! It was quite tricky and very slick. There are a few bugs, for example, it is possible to get stuck by bouncing accross to the end where the panels come up before the large panels in the middle of the water come up and then you can't go anywhere.

I really enjoyed flying through the air. One thing that was annoying was if you were at the bottom of the pit to get out you portal to a ceiling and sometimes easily fall into the water, it can get frustrating because you just want OUT! but you have to be careful.

Why does the clear gel turn off? It was pretty! And Glados had some good lines. I liked the industrial light in the broken corner.

Hey cool, glad you liked it.

I'm really curious about the bug you ran into, when you say "the large panels in the middle of the water" do you mean the big platforms that when extended line up directly next to the two big glass panels? That's really interesting if you were able to get to the other side of the slime without those popping up. There should be a trigger that fires when you enter that area that automatically starts part of the "chamber initiation" sequence (wall panels retracting, spotlights turn on, etc) and then when you look generally towards the pit the platforms should rise up. Wonder if the trigger_look that fires the I/O for that doesn't have a generous enough POV limit. I'll definitely look into it.

If it's possible to easily reproduce it, would be able to record a demo by any chance? There are some instructions on how to do so on the Valve Developer Wiki. Would help a ton, but if you're not able to it's no biggie.

To your second point, that's a good observation. I'll look into making that less dangerous. The original 'water pit' concept that I had actually required you to 'fling' yourself out of the pit in order to escape. There are two hint icons at the bottom of the pit to this effect, and perhaps those are no longer necessary since most people seem to just use the ceiling tiles. Those tiles were actually added later on, so definitely an oversight on my part that you can fall into the water so easily from them. Thanks!

And for the last thing you mentioned, disabling the 'water' pipes after the first button press was actually a recent addition I made in v1.1 and had to do with an issue where I was basically overloading the sound 'buffer' (dunno what the right word is for it). Basically with the water constantly splashing it created a lot of separate sounds to play, and then along with a ton of panel opening/closing sounds you can occasionally get a 'TOO MANY SOUNDS. >= 96' error when you have developer mode on. I didn't really think much of it at first, but a buddy of mine actually reported getting a crash to desktop at one point and I thought perhaps it might have something to do with it. Disabling the water after it was no longer necessary to the puzzle was an attempt to avoid this, but if it's confusing then perhaps I'll keep them running rather than shutting off in the next revision.

Keep 'em comin people! Got some really good notes here.

I noticed a few texture issues, specifically using wrong ones. On a few of the walls you used dirty white panels when everything else is in a very "clean" style. You also used the 1940's "target" texture. The puzzle was short and sweet though, I liked that you kept re-using the laser and cube for different things all within the same area. A lot of maps have single testing element purposes and make the gameplay fall really flat; you did a really great job of avoiding that.

I enjoyed the tone you set for the map: it had wheatley's clean style, but Glados' evil spark. The puzzle was designed well and thoroughly used portal's puzzle mechanics properly. The use of the laser and gel were creative. The stairs and panels that you used to help navigate the map added a much interesting component to the map.

Well done. 5/5.

great map!
after playing it through a couple of times i found a few things...
- It is possible to jump through the water pipes and go in the area behind them...
- I was able to reproduce Mr. Happy's glitch with getting to the other side without the middle platform's coming up.. If you stick to the wall away from the good you don't trigger the trigger... you could fix it by extending the trigger to the roof, that way even if you fling yourself you will still trigger it in mid-air
- I was able to complete the chamber in 3 portals
also... the cube gets stuck in the dropper sometimes...

Cool, thanks for the reviews guys.

monkeyman wrote:
- It is possible to jump through the water pipes and go in the area behind them...

Haha, interesting. Never underestimate the weird stuff people will try.

Makes sense, the models likely aren't set as solid. I'll stick a clip in there on the next revision. Thanks!

Quote:
- I was able to reproduce Mr. Happy's glitch...

Cool, I'll get it patched up. Thanks for the confirmation on the bug, I'm actually out of town at the moment so I haven't been able to do so myself yet.

Quote:
also... the cube gets stuck in the dropper sometimes...

This is really weird, I noticed this once or twice and spent a lot of time trying to sort it out. I wasn't able to reproduce it before I released it, but looks like it may have snuck in again.

The really confusing part about this is that I'm using Valve's official instance for the dropper! Wonder if anyone else has run into it, I can't think of anything that would be unique to this map that might cause this. I'll continue to look into it.

I found a little alternate method that is pretty useless unless you're like me and overlook that which is obvious (I totally thought I had the intended method until I watched Djinndrache's video)
It's a different way to get up to the big button. I made a demo of it because it didn't seem like a picture would really explain it. Unfortunately there's areas covered in blue gel that doesn't show up in the demo, but it should be pretty obvious where it is spread.

I first jump from an area covered in gel, down through a portal on the surface where water splashes, then the surface I land on is also covered in blue gel so I can jump back through the portals all the way up to the high ledge. The interesting thing is that the portals are placed so the water that goes through comes out at an angle and just falls into the acid pit, leaving the gel covered surface under the portal alone.

zeta.rar

Overall I really enjoyed this map. I'm not a harsh critic on visual style, but I could tell there's some skill was put into this map. I loved the re-use of puzzle elements.

For some reason the stairs that pop out to give access to the big button once it's been pressed seem like a bit of an eyesore. That's really my only nitpick though.

Really good mapping. Challenging puzzle concepts and well executed. Thanks .....

Unfortunately, this map causes Portal 2 to crash on my computer (something I haven't experienced with any other maps). The crash always seems to occur when I'm around (in or near) the pit with the water pipes at the bottom.

The puzzle looks rather interesting, so I'll try the map out on a laptop tomorrow to see if that makes a difference.

On a related note, does anyone know how to save an error log in Portal 2? I tried "log on" but the resulting file merely records the creation and subsequent closing of the log file.

Thank you for this wonderful map. I've given it a 5/5.

On my second play-through, the game crashed while I was in the pit. And I noticed some inconsistency with texture use, but that has already been mentioned.

If this is your first map, I'd love to see what you're capable of with more practice.

PrejudicedNanobot wrote:
Unfortunately, this map causes Portal 2 to crash on my computer (something I haven't experienced with any other maps). The crash always seems to occur when I'm around (in or near) the pit with the water pipes at the bottom.

Same here. It crashed three times shortly after entering, before I got to do much more than looking around a bit. Then started with a completely new game (the previous attempts were first starting from a different custom map savegame+map command and then from the savegame of this map) to launch the map command from. But this still crashed eventually. But I did get a bit more testing done.

Hey guys!

So sorry that I haven't gotten back to you here sooner, been really busy in The Real Life and pparently my email notifications for this thread have mysteriously dissapeared into the void as well.

Thanks for all the feedback, and my apologies for the crashes. I'm going to hunker down here in the next week or two and get crackin on patching up the documented bugs here and see if I can get to the bottom of the problem. Stay tuned.

Fun! Great dialogue. It was original, wasn't it? I don't remember any of it from the game.

I enjoyed solving this map, but even v1.1 has the same bugs others have reported. I had to restart once due to an autosave of death, and I got stuck on the far side of the pit because the panels wouldn't come up. I got unstuck by leaps of faith, if you jump where the panels should be, they will come up. It was also a bit too dark for me. The puzzle and the look were good enough to earn a 4, but the bugs knock it down to a 3 for me.

Not bad but it was difficult, at least for me. I tried something which never worked and I didn't know why, but the solution turned out to be just a little different from what I have tried (and wouldn't even think of that). Just had to watch a walkthrough...

Hey hey folks!

Believe it or not, I'm ahem "Still Alive" here (groan) and have wrapped up some bug fixes for the v1.3 Release! (Better late than never right? Heh heh... elgh)

I released a v1.2 to a few friends and through some playtesting. I THINK that we were able to pin down the cause of the gut-wrenching Game Crash of Doom.

It turns out that the 'Erase' Gel blobs from an info_paint_sprayer really DO NOT LIKE water brushes. We were able to 100% reliably reproduce the total game crash by just tossing some of that water from the pipes out into the main water area. What I suspect caused most of the crashes people were reporting here is that they would get stuck in 'The Pit' and then try to get out by putting one portal on the floor and one on the white ceiling tiles. Some of the water would splash into the Water Hazard area and BOOM. Game over man.

Soooo, I am really curious to see if anyone else has any reported crashes here. If you do get smacked by one, I'll be monitoring this thread but you can also toss me a line at [email protected]

Anywho, there's brief changelog in the Readme and the Download Page so go check it out.

I've tossed in quite a bit of additional lighting for those of you that apparently don't eat as many carrots as I do, and I think it brighten things up well while still maintaining the moody atmosphere I was going for.

In addition, I've re-arranged a few things for clarity's sake and a whole slew of other Misc Changes. I liked the 50s concrete for the Gel Target and didn't really think it was that jarring, but the people have spoken so enjoy your new modernistic grate and uber-reticle. I went through the thread and collected your comments and I think I've mostly addressed everyone's issues. I'll respond to a few in particular in my next post.

Sorry for the wait, Enjoi! ^_^

Thanks to everyone for the appreciation and constructive feedback! I'd single out the individual compliments and respond to each, but that might make me seem slightly more narcissistic than I truly am.

monkeyman wrote:
I was able to reproduce Mr. Happy's glitch with getting to the other side without the middle platform's coming up.. If you stick to the wall away from the good you don't trigger the trigger... you could fix it by extending the trigger to the roof, that way even if you fling yourself you will still trigger it in mid-air

Crazypants. Should be fixed in v1.3, thanks!

Adair wrote:
I found a little alternate method that is pretty useless unless you're like me and overlook that which is obvious (I totally thought I had the intended method until I watched Djinndrache's video)
It's a different way to get up to the big button. I made a demo of it because it didn't seem like a picture would really explain it.

Ho-Lee-Crap! Watched this a few days ago and I gotta say, that is GENIUS! I would have never thought to do it that way, well done!

Adair wrote:
For some reason the stairs that pop out to give access to the big button once it's been pressed seem like a bit of an eyesore. That's really my only nitpick though.

Yeah, fair enough. v1.3 should be slightly less uggo since it has a full suite of panels now and there are no gaps you have to hop over, but overall thems just the way it is at this point. Thanks for the feedback and rad demo!

PrejudicedNanobot wrote:
Unfortunately, this map causes Portal 2 to crash on my computer (something I haven't experienced with any other maps). The crash always seems to occur when I'm around (in or near) the pit with the water pipes at the bottom.

Sorry for the trouble and thanks for the report. As mentioned in my previous post, I think (that's a big "think") that I've solved the crash issue in v1.3 by preventing the water blobs from interacting with the main water area. We'll see if there are more reports going forward.

PrejudicedNanobot wrote:
On a related note, does anyone know how to save an error log in Portal 2? I tried "log on" but the resulting file merely records the creation and subsequent closing of the log file.

Good lord, I would really love an answer to this as well. It would have made my life so much easier on this, but the best I ever got was -condebug, which writes out your console to a .log file. Unfortunately, if the game actually crashes it doesn't log jack-shite so you're kinda SOL at that point. If anyone out there knows of anything better, I will give you my first born with a side of bacon.

bjs0 wrote:
If this is your first map, I'd love to see what you're capable of with more practice.

Aw shucks. :3

nikdangr wrote:
Fun! Great dialogue. It was original, wasn't it? I don't remember any of it from the game.

Hah, glad you enjoyed it but sadly I don't do that good of a GLaDOS impression.

All of the dialogue is in the original game assets (actually had to be for the original map contest submissions rules) but some of GLaDOS's lines I used were never actually used in the Portal 2 campaign! I think I listed to every single one of her dialogue files about three times before finally trimming down and finding a handful that I thought matched the map and kept making me laugh. Her bit about why she hates you definitely was never used in the campaign and I thought it would be great to use it so other people could enjoy it without having to dig through the game files.

KennKong wrote:
The puzzle and the look were good enough to earn a 4, but the bugs knock it down to a 3 for me.

Aw snap, sorry for the troubles. Hope you have a change to check out the v1.3 release and perhaps reconsider. Thanks in any case!

Mek wrote:
Not bad but it was difficult, at least for me.

Ah yeah, I designed the basic puzzle elements like RIGHT after finishing the Portal 2 Single Player campaign so I went a bit nuts with trying to rack my brain for an inventive way to use the momentum mechanic for a puzzle. Sorry you had trouble, hope you still had some fun in the end.

All right, that's about it for me, for now. Heading to bed, I'm not sure how many of you will see my reply buried down in here after such a long time but I again just wanted to say thanks for playing and taking the time to talk about it! If the stars align (and I miraculously find a huge chunk of free time hiding in the seat cushions of my couch), I'll get crackin on another one for ya in the future.

-Z-