This is NOT a puzzle. (Update: I made a mistake on txt document. Don't type "map mp_coop_ctc" while in the coop hub, type "changelevel mp_coop_ctc" instead.) This is a Portal 2 themed Capture the Flag. If your are "strictly" a puzzle player, then don't download this map. If you like trying something different for a change then go head and download this. This is an experiment that I hope will be successful. Please give me feedback about this! I don't mind criticism, in fact I welcome it. However, I don't want to hear "this map sucks, this ideas sucks, etc." because it's not worth my time. If you have an issue with the map, be mature about it, be specific and tell me about it.
There is a txt document that explains the rules and running the map so I'll just mention a few:
Make sure your character is on their side of the map.
Hide your cube, make turrets to defend your cube.
Make sure your friend is finished hiding his cube.
First one to throw their rival's cube in the Emancipation Grid wins.

Stuff in the Map:
Box Droppers to replace cubes when vaporized
Button triggered Turret Maker
Button triggered Turret Disposer (A Special Emancipation Grid)
Notice about Buttons: Only operates with the correct character. The Robots can only activate stuff that is on their side of the map.

Hate to repeat myself but really do look at the txt document

Have Fun!

File Name: Capture The Cube.zip
File Size: 1.49 MiB
Click here to download Capture the Cube

The idea is very nice but imo its way too easy as all the area is portal surface.
It's too easy to kill the turrets by just placing portals under their feet. Also you could just put portals behind them and get them from behind.

Maybe you could also add funnels and hardlight surfaces to each side so that the player might have to use those elements to reach certain points of the map. The use of gels is more difficult as the player who is hiding the cube will have to use the gels already, so if you add gels then the first player would have to be able to wash it away with erase-gel.

The basic idea is really great, but I think there are some improvements to be made before it's really fun because at the moment it's just too simple to get through the course.

Very good points. I was thinking of adding lasers before I released it, however I wasn't sure if I could pull it off or not. When I make a second one I'll try to add more stuff besides turrets.
By the way, did anyone playing this find the second floor by any chance?

Should have keep my room sized Emancipation Grid for vaporizing stuff. Dang it!

The second floor was nothing like hidden. Very easy to find it as I walked all ways to explore the map. Almost impossible to miss it

Ok, good. It wasn't meant to be hidden. I was actually thinking of making a second entrance to the second floor, but you found it.

Randomized Hard Light Walls turning on and off would be interesting in changing the level layout every few seconds/minutes.

The Irate Pirate wrote:
Randomized Hard Light Walls turning on and off would be interesting in changing the level layout every few seconds/minutes.

mh.. within a single "run" the walls should change? Or only between the "runs"?

Maybe during the individual ones, to make you have to change tactics. Or possibly between runs, it probably wouldn't matter.

One of ideas I scrapped was a special room in which players could activate 2 of 4 traps in the room. Maybe I should use that for the next map. The traps included Lasers, Hard Light Walls, a room sized Emancipation Grid that gets rid of Portals only every 8 seconds, and the Excursion Funnel to throw off player.

I found a perfect turret-lineup that my mate was not able to break: http://img189.imageshack.us/img189/8497/ctcperfect.png


We also played a "real" round of this game and recorded this, video of that coming soon

I know how to break it: shoot portal at the wall near turrets before jumping down from respawn area. Shoot another portal on your side of the arena. Then get those turrets! I tried this on myself. A few deaths, but it is breakable.

Again, thank you for recording my map.

A second Capture the Cube map will be coming soon and will include some of the scrap ideas that mentioned earlier. There will be more traps included. However, I don't think I'll include gels in this map. It might get too complicated. I'll try testing with the gel before I make my final decision. Remember, this is a competition, not a puzzle. I'm thinking of using the first map as a template for the second.

One more thing: Could you guys hear some of the music playing? I include some music in the map.

We did not have music

Aww, crap. I heard them in my test play, but not when playing with my friend. Maybe I should change it to play everywhere. There were 2 ambient_generic sounds. One in the middle room and one in the players room.

Here is the run we made: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdWBTKchBzw

The problems with the run are already stated above in this thread. I'm looking forward for an updated map, maybe we'll play again then

The updated for this map will mainly contain the music (if i can fix it).

When I make the 2nd CTC map the rooms will look a little different due to more traps in the map. And I'll add a Trap Control Room for observing and controlling the traps being added.

Great video, Djinndrache

It might take a while longer to get the 2nd CTC map running. I'll let you know when its ready

Update on CTC 2: Trap Control Room is finished! First trap, "Deadly Lasers" is now operational. One touch of these lasers is an instant death.

Hmm, I see quite a lot of potential in this "game-mode". Would you allow other people to make maps with a similar premise (of course giving credit to you for the original idea) to add to it? Minigames are not utilised enough in Portal 2, they are in other source games and mods, this needs to change.

I would be more than happy to have people make CTF/Capture the Flag maps as long as they don't label it CTC/Capture the Cube. I don't mind if they use a cube as a "flag" though. CTC is something I came up with on my own and prefer to keep the title to myself. People should make up their own title for this. So, if anyone is interested in making a Capture the Flag map for Portal 2, then go for it! Again, just don't call it CTC/Capture the Cube.

CTC 2 Update: Hard Light Walls and Excursion Funnels are now working. Now working on the secret death trap...

I have a few suggestions, as me and a friend played this for a few hours last night and very much enjoyed our time. First off, make it so that when a player in on their side of the field, it enabled the 'notarget' cheat. We ended up having to type in the command manually when we wanted to set up our turrets, and frankly there was no other way to do it. Without using notarget, it is very difficult to make complex puzzles for the opposing player. We would also appreciate more that 5 turrets. The map is huge and there is two floors we need to cover. Make it more interesting! Give us more turrets or something to make it more interesting! Also, me and my partner found that if you enabled gels it would allow for some much more fun puzzles. And do all the walls need to be portal surfaces? Its fun for exploring and moving around, but players should be able to change some of the walls to make them not a portal surface. This has a lot of potential.

Also, we tried the Tic Tac Toe custom map and found that CTC would be a benefit from having some of the features from that map. In Tic Tac Toe, the player who doesn't win the match explodes. Also, Portal 2 has some unused Tic Tac Toe related GLaDOS quotes. You could implement the voice clips of GLaDOS saying "Blue won" and "Orange won" to emphasize that a player has succeeded.

Again, lots of potential.

EDIT: Also! Please make some sort of "delete all" switch so we can spend less time cleaning up our mess and more time playing the game.

I'm not very good with sound/dialog, but these are very good suggestions. However, there is one problem with the more turrets idea. I COULD increase the number of turrets allowed, however I'm worried about too much NPC activity. I heard (and witnessed) what happens when too many NPC's are on a map. Even so, at your request, I will increase the turret maxspawn to 8. Keep in mind that I don't want to much activity in a map, it could lag the server and mess with the graphics. Also regarding to the notarget idea... I could figure something out. Or you can bind "notarget" to a key. Ex. bind 1 "notarget"

I also experimented with the gels and it didn't work out well. The Blue Gel caused me to land on the deadly lasers a lot. I wanted to be able to hide the cube on walls since their is no 2nd floor on this new map. So I made Excursion Beams to make up the Blue Gel. As for the Orange Gel... ran into more lasers. Sorry, but no gel is in the new map.

So to give you an idea of what's already made, here is a list:

Turret Maker: Current 8 turrets
Trap Control and Observation Room: Controls Lasers, Hard Light Walls, and Excursion Beams, Cube is impossible to keep there.
The Player's Room: Much bigger
The Secret Death Trap: It's a secret, hidden secretly, and can only be used once (Unless you reload the map). It's almost impossible to escape or deactivate unless you think ahead.
Music: There will be music.

Edit: I'm still working on my room sized Emancipation Grid, the button will be located in the Trap Control and Observation Room.

Edit #2: Emancipation Cleaning Grid and Game Music now working. The Blue Player Room should now be flawless. Now working on copying map and altering it to work on Orange's side. It's almost done!

Emancipation Cleaning Grid: Any turret touching the floor gets emancipated. You can get all 8 with one button press!

here is a suggestion, in the main room, make some checkmarks on both sides, lets say 5, when orange's cube gets destroyed, 1 checked for blue. I like to play this game but if I destroy a cube there needs to be something like 1 point for me or something. nice idea mate, wish I came up with that idea

Yeah I tried doing something similar with the first CTC map. However, the "box dropper" is a func_instance and the cube that comes out doesn't have a name so I can't connect it to the score boards. If anyone could tell me how to alter the box inside the dropper, I'll try to create a score.

Update: Everything is done, (except the scoreboards) but I'm still play testing this map to check for flaws. Any more ideas from you guys before I release it? Just to give you a heads up, I'll be releasing it on the 15th of June.

Edit: I don't think I'm going to include the scoreboards when it's released, just in case I make a massive mistake. However, I may make a version 2.1 later which will include a score when I do figure it out. By the way, your comment on the other CTC on Portal 2 SP/Coop about the bots and players, could you be more specific?

MasterLagger wrote:
Yeah I tried doing something similar with the first CTC map. However, the "box dropper" is a func_instance and the cube that comes out doesn't have a name so I can't connect it to the score boards. If anyone could tell me how to alter the box inside the dropper, I'll try to create a score.

By the way, your comment on the other CTC on Portal 2 SP/Coop about the bots and players, could you be more specific?

yes I realized that shortly after I posted it, somehow it should be able to use the cube and give it outputs, but then I should make your own, and that would be for 1 check. but if you use something like a dynamic thing that displays a number, and onFizzle, move the texture a little so that it shows number 2 and so on.
BUT! the cube has a name, ofcourse the name is the same in both cubedroppers, so again, creating a own version

second thing...well I wish this could be done but im afraid not, would be epic to have like 4 vs 4 players or something, some are protecting, some are attacking and stuff.

--
ok more suggestions..hmm, not sure, will see what we can think of after the new map

Ok I see what your getting at about the boxes. Now about the 4 vs 4 player thing, that would be awesome. But the servers that player's connect to are only local servers and the game is designed to have 2 players. Hmm... maybe I'll look this stuff up to see if people can add more players.

MasterLagger wrote:
Ok I see what your getting at about the boxes. Now about the 4 vs 4 player thing, that would be awesome. But the servers that player's connect to are only local servers and the game is designed to have 2 players. Hmm... maybe I'll look this stuff up to see if people can add more players.

yeah, would be awesome, I wish I could make a suggestion to valve to add a free mode online with max 16 players

CTC 2 Update: Ok, everything seems to be working properly. Also fixed a few glitches. Still going to continue testing till June 15th. Just one more day for you to wait. I will say that this map is almost twice as big as the first map.

MasterLagger wrote:
The updated for this map will mainly contain the music (if i can fix it).

When I make the 2nd CTC map the rooms will look a little different due to more traps in the map. And I'll add a Trap Control Room for observing and controlling the traps being added.

Great video, Djinndrache

It might take a while longer to get the 2nd CTC map running. I'll let you know when its ready

Update on CTC 2: Trap Control Room is finished! First trap, "Deadly Lasers" is now operational. One touch of these lasers is an instant death.

uhm huge bug found today, when you die you can shoot portals in both rooms, make a portal cleanser,,and ofcourse fizzler, before entering the main room, because someone was hiding his cube in my rooms

btw if you can find a solution on how to give the cube outputs, then I think I got the solution for the scoreboard, create 5 relays, all disabled. Only 1 enable, for the first check.
The cube should have 5 times, OnFizzle -> Relay_01/2/3/4/5 -> trigger.
Now they are all disabled except the first one, so that one would only trigger.
and on the first trigger you do outputs: Ontrigger -> relay_[sametrigger] -> disable. And another output, onTrigger -> relay_[nextrelay] -> Enable.
That would work, problem remains with the cubedropper instance, I've tried getting the instance in the map, so..that it's not a func_instance but everything is just in it. It works until it needs to create a new cube, but didn't do much tests and such, it should be possible, when doing this, make sure you seperate all the triggers somehow

That wasn't a bug, I left that there intentionally in case someone put turrets in the main room. Well, it's just one of those things I guess. I added the Room Cleaner Grid to CTC 2 yesterday to remove stuff touching the ground which include turrets and boxes.

Also, I'll try what you mentioned after I release the first version of CTC 2.

CTC 2 Update: Room Cleaner didn't emancipate boxes, but it does now. All music is now triggered.

We spent our time stealing each other the same cube. So yeah, as stated, very good potential but probably too sprawling a map for just 2 people to use.

If you let me, I think the problems come from the 2 souls of this project: it's both capture the flag and tower defense. If you highlighted the former, then you need more agile and short level layouts; if you choose the latter, you could have a lot of customizable features (drawbridges, panels etc) which can only modified by the enemy player so the other has to crack his "puzzle". Think of a diminutive cross between Portal and Gmod.

But more at hand this map needs more black walls, jumps and need to make portals to keep you occupied instead of portaling in and out at lightspeed. Bug: the music seems to come from a single point in mid-air with very apparent effect when you get up close.

nice

Holy crap someone brought my old map thread back. Well, I'm glad you liked it.

Iviv and LyLy here, and we played Capture the cube! We started out with a bit of a derp, we didn't read the instructions XD Though after playing around, we read the instructions and had some fun!


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