Quote from msleeper on October 22, 2007, 2:16 pm

Angel_Mapper wrote:

I'll put one up in a bit, just have to put this last ball launcher in.

Quote from Angel_Mapper on October 22, 2007, 5:19 pm

Ok, all done:

http://wiki.thinkingwithportals.com/wiki/Box_Dropper

It's not linked to the main page yet, I want someone to go through and verify that I didn't miss anything.

Quote from msleeper on October 22, 2007, 5:24 pm

Awesome, thanks a ton! I am going to go through all of the tutorials and try them out (and also make demo maps for them), so I'll be sure to make any changes when I am going through it.

Quote from Angel_Mapper on October 23, 2007, 4:21 pm

youme wrote:

It took me so long to fully get to grips with hammer, well, I've still not fully got to grips with it. for example I still dont understand area_portals, I just cant get my head around any example, they are all worded so I cant understand them

Looks like they're used for optimization. They divide the level up into zones so the game doesn't render the entire level through the walls, only what it can see through the area portals.

Same thing Unreal does with Zone Portals:
http://udn.epicgames.com/Two/LevelOptimizationBSP.html

Quote from msleeper on October 23, 2007, 4:42 pm

Areaportals are crucial to optimization. Angel is correct, they are used to tell the game engine what should and should not be rendered (and are similar, but not identical to Zone Portals).

Read this until your eyes bleed: http://www.student.ru.nl/rvanhoorn/optimization.php

EDIT: For your own edification Angel, Source's Areaportals are more powerful because we can open and close them at will. There are also Areaportalwindows which are drawn/rendered based on distance from the player, used for things such as the City 17 street battles.

Quote from Angel_Mapper on October 23, 2007, 4:49 pm

msleeper wrote:

EDIT: For your own edification Angel, Source's Areaportals are more powerful because we can open and close them at will. There are also Areaportalwindows which are drawn/rendered based on distance from the player, used for things such as the City 17 street battles.

Antiportals provide the same functionality in Unreal, by triggering them to toggle them on and off, and by CullDistance for distance from the player. These two editors really aren't that different, heheh.

Quote from msleeper on October 23, 2007, 4:53 pm

Right, well whatever.

Quote from Wroth on October 31, 2007, 5:33 pm

Is there any way to set it so that the box dropper only spawns another box if you lose the current box? so far it's spawning another one everytime a turret/camera/random physics object gets dropped in the water.

Quote from youme on October 31, 2007, 5:53 pm

Wroth wrote:

Is there any way to set it so that the box dropper only spawns another box if you lose the current box? so far it's spawning another one everytime a turret/camera/random physics object gets dropped in the water.

You'll need to use a filter on your trigger_remove, or whatever trigger you used.
set up a filter_activator_name and name it something like box_filter and set the filtertarget to the same name as the box. Or something like that