Salience - pertaining to Sa-li-ent:
Adjective - Prominent or Conspicuous.

Why is this map prominent? Because it's my first! (No don't run away!) This map features not just cubes, buttons, fizzlers and funnels in GLaDOS's Clean environment, but most importantly:-

You can only fire one portal.

Yes, in a style that is reminiscent (read: stolen) from the Blue Portals mod from old, but it brings some light and enlightenment into a completely unused aspect of portal puzzling. This map is 99% bug-free and I spent my whole summer holidays bringing life to it, so I know that I put the effort into it. But don't take my word for it, listen to these testimonies from past test subjects:

"{REDACTED}" - Chell

"My arm got bitten off by Mantis Men halfway-through. Would not test again." - Josh Ovencan

- RubbishyUsername
CEO of Rat Puree Laboratories

Known minor bugs:
Sometimes the elevator will not move at the start. Reload the map or noclip out to fix.

Updates:
V1.1 - Made an unintended solution harder, added portal emitter lights, and a couple of other minor changes.

File Name: Aperture_Salience_v1_1.zip
File Size: 2.13 MiB
Click here to download Aperture Salience

The first room is good... but the elevator won't move me further?

Really good-looking map, RubbishyUsername. Unfortunately I couldn't solve it so far, and since I have get up early, I'm gonna' go to bed. Leaving me with speculation on the map. Also taken the liberty of looking at the advanced version; seems somewhat impossible to me, so haven't spent any time there yet...
Sorry for not being able to send you much feedback, although I must say, astonishing looks. Actually DOES remind me of Blue Portals, my complements on that. I'll see if I can solve it tomorrow and send you better feedback.

PS: Is there really any need for a VPK? Only use I could see in that is getting rid of that potatoe. Or did I miss something custom? Anyway, it doesn't seem to help your elevator. Rest is excellent, thinking 5 cakes, after solving I'll hand them over by vote.

EDIT: Completed both maps, still think they're excellent.
Although I only saw one solution to the advanced version, where I threw the cube up. Didn't use the funnel at all... Short maps, but I'll take short and good over long and awfull anytime. Good job.

Intresting map. Good use of texturing.
But this puzzle can be easily solved by throwing cubes at the buttons without using the funnels.

Nice looking map in the clean style.
However, is the cube a red herring? Did it without using the cube.

Firstly, glad you all enjoyed it. The reason I could spend so much effort on one room is because there is only one room, if that answers your question arvisrend. Unless you mean that the exit elevator doesn't move, which would be something weird: I'll look into it if that's the case.

Secondly, I wouldn't be surprised if you could use cube-throwing to succeed, although I kind of figured that if you could throw the cube high enough to work, then well done for succeeding anyway. In the same way, you could use the reportal glitch to solve this easily, but then there's nothing that I can do about that and it can be fairly challenging to use that glitch if you don't know how.

Finally, I would really love to know how you did the puzzle without the cube, Godfather. Did you use a reportal glitch? How did you do it?

I simply
went through the emancipation grid made a portal against the wall, then while using the tractor beam, made a few more slightly higher until i reached the button. Then went to the other side and did the same thing. Is that a glitch? Its a mechanic I've used many times before.

No it isn't... darn, I get 4 hours into releasing a level and someone has already picked a hole in it.

I'll try and fix it tommorrow. Shouldn't be impossible...

The entrance elevator doesn't seem to start. I had to noclip up the elevator shaft. This probably means you need the arrival and departure transition instance. Considering that you had elevator videos, you may already have separate arrival and departure transition instances, but for the entrance elevator to work you need the combined arrival and departure transitions instance.

I solved it by throwing the cube upwards at the buttons on the ceiling. Even though that's probably not the intended solution... At any rate, it looks good from a visual standpoint, which is rare not only for a person's first map, but also for clean style chambers.

EDIT: Oh, and one more thing. In Valve's maps, they have orange lights on around in those portal frames when an orange portal created by the frame is present in the frame. You can do this by making those prop_dynamic entities, giving them different targetnames, and have the buttons turn on and off the orange lights as necessary by changing the skin on the models.

I thought it was great, I didn't have any elevator issues in either the normal nor advanced. I'm pretty sure I figured out the intended solution for the normal one:
You put the cube over the small room orange portal (not the gravity beam one), put a blue portal under the gravity beam, right when it hits the top go into the other room, put a portal under the button and press the small button, right?
I thought I figured out the advanced one, unless there was a bug (or maybe I was wrong):
I noticed one of the buttons was jutted out, so I put the gravity thing along the top of the side wall, and the cube stumbled across the button, momentarily pressing it, but when I tried to do that for the other room, the button was not jutted out and I could not do that.
Great map. Very good for your first one, and it really didn't have any texture glitches or anything.

Very simple and straightforward puzzle design; the only complaint I have is that the cube doesn't spawn until you walk directly underneath the dropper - it should spawn as soon as you enter the room. I spent a while in confusion because I thought I had to somehow activate it first.

The advanced version relied a fair bit more on timing and precision; though one of the buttons (the extended one) I managed to activate just by dicking around, chucking the cube across the room. I think I had more fun solving that one, though.

Very nice map. Like the above commenter said you should have the cube dropper spawn a cube as soon as you enter the room. I didn't even notice it and spent five minutes trying to solve it without a cube. Otherwise everything is looking very nice.

BOB74j: I used the arrival/departure transition instance but I had to muck around with the logic script to get rid of the potato and orange portal firing ability. Yes, I meant to put the portal emitter lights for the orange portals, but I forgot. I'll add that in v1.1.

NuclearDuckie et. al.: I'll fix the cube dropper trigger for v1.1.

Rlink0: Yeah, that's the intended solution for normal right there, and there are a couple of variations on that that are slightly harder. For your advanced solution, that looks like a variation of Godfather's technique. I'll try to fix that for v1.1.

I'll try to have v1.1 up by 8:00 or 9:00 GMT (going to a friend's house to watch him play it now).

I'm really pleased and amazed at how quickly the community responds to new maps. It's already had 100 downloads in half a day. Thanks guys!

By the way, I think the problem people are having with your entrance elevator is due to the fact that you only used the _base instance and not the _logic instance for it. For more info, see here. You've probably read it already, but you must have missed a step.

Reminiscent of Portal 1 and Blue Portal in that, two solid microchambers of considerable difficulty.

I actually found the normal one more difficult than the advanced, because of the rapid movement required in such a small confinement. See if you can connect the 2 chambers by the exit elevators, or via a switcher.

Here's a playthrough of the first chamber while I'm scratching my head over the second!

oQH42VXIhRE

EDIT: And here's the advanced chamber.

-e0iwIQeEXc

So, any progress in fixing the elevator? I want to see chamber 2...

I'm not sure about the correct way to solve that, I:
NyTtuSooTc0

infernet89 wrote:
I'm not sure about the correct way to solve that, I:
NyTtuSooTc0

Invalid. Using the Sixense script breaks most puzzles anyway.

arvisrend wrote:
So, any progress in fixing the elevator? I want to see chamber 2...

Type "map sp_aperture_advsalience" into the console to play the advanced chamber.

awkisopen wrote:
Type "map sp_aperture_advsalience" into the console to play the advanced chamber.

Ah thanks.

In the advanced chamber I am able to jump and toss the cube up to the buttons. Is this the intended way? Somehow I doubt it...

I had some downtime for most of today so I wasn't able to work on v1.1 .

Still, I can now use the computer so I'm back in business! Everything on the map is fiddled around with, so all I have to do is update the scripts.

Secondly, I haven't been able to fix the transitions. They work on my computer, but not on other people's. I reckon this has something to do with the transitions not working with the arrival/departure ent. (I have a custom transitions list script, so its possible that I put that in the wrong place so it's presence isn't being recognised.)

I'm interested in your opinions on making the rooms taller or recessing the buttons into the ceilings. This would cut cube throwing shenanigans but I don't think it would look as good aesthetically. What do you guys think?

Maybe I'm just a moron like Wheatley, but I can't seem to install the map properly. I have the .vpk file in C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\portal 2\portal2\maps\addons, but when I go into the Developer Console in the game, no matter what I type in, it can't find the map. This is the first time I've had a vpk file map, so I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong. Please help. Thank you.

You have to restart Portal 2 for new .vpks to be loaded. Then just type 'map salience' and it should bring up the map names as options.

Rubrica, I have both the elevator base and the logic. In order to get the level to transition, I have done what it reccomends here and arranged my own arrival/departure transition ent pointing at my own transition_list script. Now when somebody downloads it it seems to fail to see the transition list at all. I've just checked with a friend and I discovered that's because I failed to package it.



I'm also going to reduce the timer in the advanced chamber to make it more interesting.

RubbishyUsername wrote:
I'm also going to reduce the timer in the advanced chamber to make it more interesting.

Aw man. One of the things I liked about the advanced chamber is that the puzzle was difficult to figure out but the execution was easy; the opposite was true in the first chamber. This made the first chamber a lot less satisfying than the second for me.

I'm having trouble with the vpk map as well. I made the addon folder, put in the Map folder, extracted the vpk to that folder, restarted Portal 2, and it still can't be found! Any help here?

meb9000 wrote:
I'm having trouble with the vpk map as well. I made the addon folder, put in the Map folder, extracted the vpk to that folder, restarted Portal 2, and it still can't be found! Any help here?

The VPK goes in the "addons" folder, which in turn is in the "portal2" folder.

The instructions for vpk said to make an 'addons' folder and put that folder into the Map folder.

meb9000 wrote:
The instructions for vpk said to make an 'addons' folder and put that folder into the Map folder.

Which instructions were those? That won't work. You have to put it in the portal2 folder (Steam\steamapps\common\portal 2\portal2\addons) for it to work.

Don't worry, I'm not going to reduce the timer by too much, awkisopen! At the moment its 35 seconds, which is enough to do each side individually and exit. That's why some people found it easier than the original.

I've uploaded v1.1.

I'm playing custom maps and record my first time of playing them. So the run is not perfect and may not use only intended ways, but maybe it can let you see how other people may understand the map or you could just enjoy someone playing this map for entertainment.
Anyways, here is the recording:

gO-R-KpUnl0
(Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gO-R-KpUnl0)

Also note the video description for more feedback and my signature for additional project information.

awkisopen wrote:
meb9000 wrote:

The instructions for vpk said to make an 'addons' folder and put that folder into the Map folder.

Which instructions were those? That won't work. You have to put it in the portal2 folder (Steam\steamapps\common\portal 2\portal2\addons) for it to work.

Yeah, the instructions on this site did. Thank you for that helpful piece of information.

Except for the transitions not working, and the cube not dropping at the start, I found this to be a nice little headscratcher. The first chamber was pretty straightforward. I solved the second by having portals in both rooms, jumping off the cube and grabbing, then yoyoing to hit the buttons. Because it took longer to load the map than solve it, just 3/5 from me.

The transition script is Valve's way to make it easy to swap maps in, out and around during development. Don't use it yourself, just use changelevel and disconnect commands directly in your transition logic.