Quote from hanging_rope on September 22, 2010, 6:04 pm

I've never had the problem.

Quote from msleeper on September 24, 2010, 3:42 am

Just finished it, great map pack and it left me wishing there was more. Stuff like this makes me wish people spent less time making "mods" and more time making killer maps.

I really enjoyed the [spoiler]large ball launcher/catcher puzzle[/spoiler] in map 2, but the final part really kinda ticked me. [spoiler]Maybe I missed something, but it seemed like you had to portal-and-pray to get it to bounce into the final catcher. I've never liked the launcher/catcher puzzles where you have to arbitrarily make it bounce and hope it goes into the catcher.[/spoiler] I might be way off base though, I did play it at 3am so maybe I was thinking with hurr, but that's how I solved it.

The 3rd map was fucking brutal. Definitely had me banging my head a little bit. There seemed like there was a 30 indicator strip pileup on [spoiler]the 2nd level where the 2 moving buttons were at[/spoiler] so I wasn't entirely sure what was doing what, but the spinning buttons and shifting gravity made things very interesting! I really would like to see more of this, are you guys planning on making more maps or are you leaving it at 3?

Aside from 1 or 2 totally dark metal hallways, the detailing, lighting and atmosphere was fucking flawless. This is how Portal maps should look and feel, everything was spot-fucking-on. I liked the sparse usage of GLaDOS voices, it kept it in the "Portal" mindset without trying to throw in every quip from the game in the span of 3 maps.

My biggest complaint was that the HDR was a little much in some areas, especially around any kind of glass. The autosaves were a welcome addition, but I don't think enough of them were used in some areas. I also got AI Disabled problems when changing maps normally so I had to load them manually.

Not sure if this is a bug or not, but in the very beginning of the 2nd map when it demonstrates the gravity effect, you can keep using that button and it will keep spawning more and more boxes. I got 5 or 6 at one point, and while hilarious, might confuse people to the true intent of the effect.

The gravity effect, while very cool, could probably have used some more teaching to the player before it was used in it's full extent in map 3. I don't think I got a really solid grasp on how it worked, and I made several leaps of faith into what I thought was going to be a reverse gravity zone, only to fall all the way to the bottom of the room.

Quote from MrTwoVideoCards on September 24, 2010, 7:15 am

Yeah we messed up on the "teaching people" part. I steadily tried to use gravity in various ways to teach the player, but eventually like every other map me and Happy made at that time quickly hit map limits. The whole [spoiler]rotating all the panels in the ball catcher room[/spoiler] really sucked up some form of map data, though I can't remember exactly what it was. Source can handle some moving brushes, but that was the first time I had ever seen Source actually tell us "NO MORE MOVING BRUSHES MKAY?".

Due to that we eventually split the map up into separate parts, and put some of them in map 3 with a few extra puzzles happy made. When we moved the puzzles around we sort of broke the ideal learning curve we were working on.

The original idea was to have the section where you can enter my puzzle on the left, and happy's puzzle on the right be a 3 entrance section. You could choose to do any puzzle you wanted, though mine ended up being fairly easy due to the learning curve we had before, while happy's was a nut buster.

I'm not sure if Happy's on-board, though I would definitely like to go and make some more gravity based puzzles in the future. It took around some 5 months to get all those maps together, where at least half a month was spent on getting the prototype working, then making it look good. It ended up pretty expensive in terms of ent data, so that was a few of the reasons I hadn't continued to make more gravity maps. I wanted to approach it with more knowledge on how to handle those areas better, and come back to it later.

I would very much like to go ahead and do it in Portal 2, and throw in some of the new gameplay mechanics already seen.

Also we allow the player to keep spawning boxes in the gravity test area. Before we had no limit on how much you could make, some play testers spawned so much it would crash the game, or just hog up your cpu. Good times.

Quote from Mr. Happy on October 8, 2010, 7:07 pm

Map was difficult to debug the edge cases, but so glad we did

edit: removed sardonicism

Quote from MrTwoVideoCards on November 11, 2010, 8:54 am

Mr. Happy wrote:

That fucking ball angle wall room I hate that room.

Fixing all the bugs throughout the puzzles in maps two and three made me want to kill myself espcially cause that room made compiles take 3-4 hours on my old underpowered computer.

I don't know how much time I spent trying to break one of m2's puzzle and everytime I thought I'd fixed all random contingency bugs a new one would come up!

That and tweaking entity values for a week straight to not surpass particle limits and still have it look decent.

Man sorry bro, we gotta streamline that shit for the next go.

Quote from kataruna on January 21, 2011, 3:29 am

Hi. I just finished playing Gear Portal Map-pack. It was good and innovative. I encountered some bugs along the way. Once the moving platform didn't move at all, until I closed the game and relaunched it later resuming from the last autosave. Once while in the elevator going to the third map I couldn't move out of the elevator, as if there was something holding me there tightly. Again I had to reload the last autosave in order to be able to move out of the elevator. I got the AI disabled error in the third map or in end of the second map if I'm remembering right, although I don't even know what it means exactly and I was able to play the map just fine without the AI.

The third map was very confusing, at least for me. I would expect it to be more organized. Even after being able to put the cubes on some buttons I had some trouble figuring out the function of that button, saying "what now? Where do I go now?".

And mssleeper, let me give you a hint:[spoiler]The last ball catcher in the second map is actually very easy. Just put a portal on top of it on the roof. It will catch the ball from 90 degrees angle. I don't know if that's cheating but that was the first solution which came into my mind.[/spoiler]

Anyway it was a very entertaining challenge. Thanks for it and please keep up the good work.