ChickenMobile and Lpfreaky90 present to you the first map from our coop series "Portals of Doom and Friendship!".

This series is based on the principle of both coop bots having one portal at their leisure and they're linked together. This first map is mostly for training: It's quite easy once you understand the mechanic.

More coming soon!


File Name: mp_coop_link_portal_test1.zip
File Size: 4.48?MiB
FreakyChicken's Portals of Doom and Friendship prt1

We'd love to hear your feedback!

I already told you that I love this. Had much fun when we played it, I hope to see many more chambers of this.

It was awesome, awesome concept and all.

update 1.1:
Added glados camera's (wave hi to her!)
Improved shadows
* Added a link to the next map for when it comes out. And a link to the lobby if the map is missing.

Wow, that was really cool. Being able to portal through fizzlers is only weird for about 5 seconds, then it becomes completely natural like some alternate game mode for coop. It's really short, and doesn't present any challenge at the moment, but since it messes with the fairly rigid setup of having fizzlers, grates,windows and lasers each allowing only certain things through I bet you could make some really mischevious puzzles. Cheers

I did a playthrough with my evil twin Bricklesick:
(Isn't he handsome?)
Q-nf7ttC_No

Pretty funny concept. However the puzzles so far are pretty simple. We would need some more example maps to judge the concept properly. So far Svenofix and I enjoyed it.

BW33fT_CNSA
(Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BW33fT_CNSA)

First of all: Awesome avatar Those chickens look so freaky indeed.

Really nice idea girls! As sickle said (btw your evil twin "brick" looks a bit scary to me, man!) at first is a bit weird to think with one portal... Indeed that is the best part, the most challenging, and the puzzle looks a bit difficult until you realize that fizzlers don't matter anymore ...was great!

Look forward to play more of this!

Hi,
this "new" coop mode is something my buddy and I wished for quite a long time...
We wondered if it would even be possible to have 2 portals for each, both linked between the two player's guns, like you did with this map, just two-way. e.g. Player A has darkBlue/Red and Player B has Yellow/lightBlue, (just keep the left/right-mousebutton-portal-color allocation of the original coop portal guns to avoid confusion)
At first it looks like redundancy, but it would bring a lot of new fun as you can get back all the complex flinging and funnel/lightbridge redirecting. Just then one player often has to come to the other to fire him/her another portal to have more possibilities in one room, then go back to his/her own room.
I guess it would open up a lot of new test chamber possibilities.

Only thing is that you have to close the doors to previous rooms a lot more often, as one player could go and fetch quite anything that is needed from a completed room (cubes, lightbridge, funnels etc.) to cheat.
The other problem with too many possibilities to go back and forth in a test chamber you could prevent by just having a limited number of portal-surfaces in the rooms, so the players have to choose which portal they use.

I'm not sure if this is possible at all, but if so, maybe you can change it even in-game by a button or something, for example starting with one portal per player, then moving to two portals that are linked between the two guns, and then back to the original coop-behavior, just as it fits the test chambers.

Keep on the good work,
we're looking forward to those new maps.

Thank you!

Ardego wrote:
Hi,
this "new" coop mode is something my buddy and I wished for quite a long time...
We wondered if it would even be possible to have 2 portals for each, both linked between the two player's guns, like you did with this map, just two-way. e.g. Player A has darkBlue/Red and Player B has Yellow/lightBlue, (just keep the left/right-mousebutton-portal-color allocation of the original coop portal guns to avoid confusion)
At first it looks like redundancy, but it would bring a lot of new fun as you can get back all the complex flinging and funnel/lightbridge redirecting. Just then one player often has to come to the other to fire him/her another portal to have more possibilities in one room, then go back to his/her own room.
I guess it would open up a lot of new test chamber possibilities.

Only thing is that you have to close the doors to previous rooms a lot more often, as one player could go and fetch quite anything that is needed from a completed room (cubes, lightbridge, funnels etc.) to cheat.
The other problem with too many possibilities to go back and forth in a test chamber you could prevent by just having a limited number of portal-surfaces in the rooms, so the players have to choose which portal they use.

I'm not sure if this is possible at all, but if so, maybe you can change it even in-game by a button or something, for example starting with one portal per player, then moving to two portals that are linked between the two guns, and then back to the original coop-behavior, just as it fits the test chambers.

Keep on the good work,
we're looking forward to those new maps.

Thank you!

We thought about this but it just gets too confusing. The amazing thing about portal is that if you combine things in a clever way it can turn out to be an entire new and challenging puzzle. With the linked portal shared between players we have a "new" test element, which allows the players to interact with the world differently. We believe that this is good enough.

While a double cross-linked set of portals sounds awesome it will also give a lot of design challenges: What can a player do with a double set if they can already get past every fizzler? How are players going to comunicate what set they're using: It just simply gets too complex and not fun anymore. That's why we didn't do it.

I 100% agree. Having double linked portals would be wayyy too confusing. Perhaps some advanced puzzle can be made with this, but for now 1 set it is good enough.

A fresh concept but (at least for us) troubled with a few technical problems. Despite that, this first map serveed as gentle training for the single linkage concept. In our playthrough, my partner had a terrible internet connection, so that may be to blame for his problems; nevertheless I thought they should be reported. No problems visually - clean style executed without any trouble. The best part of the single-linkage setup is that every portal placement becomes a co-operative task, which is the whole point of Portal 2 multiplayer. Highly enjoyable.

Technical Problems
My partner experienced all sorts of weirdness, including strange visibility issues, an out-of-body experience and strange rendering through portals. In the last screenshot, the blue line is mat_leafvis 2; we were investigating what was happening.) My partner speculated that the game was struggling with 'prediction' due to his high ping and the non-standard portal linkage.

For some reason, after one of us died, we would place different colour portals. Sometimes it was the rebuilt robot who changed colour; other times it was the survivor. At one point, we managed to have three portals active.

Playthrough Report
The biggest concept that the map teaches you is that fizzlers take on a seriously reduced role. Because they only fizzle one portal, you can effectively ignore them when it comes to portal placement. Perhaps an uber-fizzler could be introduced as a test element in later puzzles, which would fizzle both sets of portals.

Having clocked how fizzlers worked, we immediately took the cubed from the first room through to the second.. Then the laser puzzle had us stuck: clearly we needed to reidrect the laser through both relays at once, with the laser exiting perpendicular to the white wall. But we simply didn't have the means to redirect the laser in that fashion. Five to ten minutes later, I promptly realised that we'd completely missed the second cube dispenser, at which point we (metaphorically) kicked ourselves.

The final exit door was open as soon as we got there. I suspect the final receiver was triggered by accident earlier aand the door stayed open. Probably best to make that door a coop-checkpoint, so that both players have to be nearby AND the receiver needs to be active.

At the end, what I assume was a transition the to second map failed. Here's some console gibbish for you.
Console Gibberish
SAVEGAME: 1250.3kb, 417.4kb used by 1150 entities (mp_coop_link_portal_test1)
SAVEGAME: 37.5kb, 20.3kb used by 269 entities (mp_coop_link_portal_test1)
Loading game from //DEFAULT_WRITE_PATH/SAVE/76561198024952474/mp_coop_link_portal_test2.HL1...
ERROR: couldn't open.
exec: couldn't exec skill1.cfg
Executing listen server config file
exec: couldn't exec listenserver.cfg
exec: couldn't exec skill1.cfg
==== calling mapspawn.nut

Level transition ERROR
Can't find connection to mp_coop_link_portal_test1 from mp_coop_link_portal_test2
Falling back to 'map' command...

prop_weighted_cube at (-1632.000, 960.000, 1688.000) has no model name!
prop_weighted_cube at (-1056.000, 2624.000, 1048.000) has no model name!
-> Reservation cookie 0: reason netsupport
Dropped [BRO] Yuki from server (Server shutting down)
Terminate 1100001027f0436
Destroyed NS_SERVER connection to 1100001027f0436
Dropped [BRO] BEARD! from server (Server shutting down)
maxplayers set to 2
---- Host_NewGame ----
Host_NewGame on map mp_coop_link_portal_test2
exec: couldn't exec skill1.cfg
Executing listen server config file
exec: couldn't exec listenserver.cfg
exec: couldn't exec skill1.cfg
==== calling mapspawn.nut
prop_weighted_cube at (-1632.000, 960.000, 1688.000) has no model name!
prop_weighted_cube at (-1056.000, 2624.000, 1048.000) has no model name!
Disconnect: Server shutting down.
Disconnect: Server shutting down.

Iviv and LyLy here, and we played Freaky Chicken's Portals of Doom and Friendship. We really love the idea behind this. It works really well and was fun. Near the end of the video I (LyLy) was having some visual errors with the lasers not showing and portals causing me to spaz around and get disoriented. Iviv was recording, so I don't have video of it, sadly. Just my complaining about it.


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make the players have two colors of portal: p1=blue/green p2=orange/yellow the blue portal connect to the orange, and the green, connect to the yellow (sorry for my english, i'm brazilian, and my english isnt perfect)

Zambonifofex wrote:
make the players have two colors of portal: p1=blue/green p2=orange/yellow the blue portal connect to the orange, and the green, connect to the yellow (sorry for my english, i'm brazilian, and my english isnt perfect)

This has been mentioned before and I believe that this over complicates things terribly. Plus because portals like to link to the opposite ID: the portals would have to link to one player's secondary and other player's primary.