Old Aperture How to:
can anyone help on old aperture style like waht to's what not to do and how to start it and stuff?
What I like to do in old Aperture is about the same I do in the clean mapping guide I partially made so far; use blocks of 128x128x16, vary with textures and make sure all the textures fit. After
you layed down your map and it works start deleting parts and replace them by the big X or / models. (they are either 128x128x16 or 128x256x16 so that should do.) After you did that playtest to see if your more open world doesn't break your map by allowing you to portal to another test before finishing your current one. This is very important, but quite hard to do.
Don'ts: Don't use new elements in old Aperture, old aperture is old. There were no funnels or hard light bridges in old aperture.
Also when you delete brushes and replace them with the X or / Models or even turn a wall into a grate put an area portal where the brush used to be, this keeps your map sealed nice and tight, however if most of the room is open to the outside you might as well just make it all func_detail, and not use areaportals
this is of course assuming you are making an underground sphere chamber.
also try to avoid using lasers.... that's an iffy underground element, however LP was able to pull it off in one of her MEL maps
I highly reccomend replaying all cave johnson maps, and this time look around like at the supports and stuff... noclip around, then decompile those maps and see what they did exactly to achieve these effects
another thing, most people dont realize that everything in portal 2 makes sense(sortof), what I mean by this is... when you are walking on debris that debris came from somewhere and you can usually look around and find the spot... or walkways, every test chamber has walkways from elevators to the chamber then perhaps to another chamber then to another elevator, so design your chambers to look like they used to be functional. Dont make solving the chamber only possible because there is a broken wall or something, this makes no sense, remember these used to be real chambers that were not broken.... try to make those... then break them down for details sake
this is of course assuming you are making an underground sphere chamber.
I would be very very careful with this. Areaportals that are in sight are expensive: they actively calculate what you can and cannot see. If you have a lot of them it can cause lag. I would recommend filling these holes up with skip and apply hint to the outer face. This is also optimization and it's not as good as areaportals, but it's a lot cheaper.
If you have a very open area where you can see inside 2 or 3 other test chambers you might want to go for func_details indeed.
If you decide to use a geosphere; you should figure out where the edges are then hide it or delete it and put it in later. Trying to use the editor with all those extra lines is a nightmare. Another thing I have noticed is that all the walls are thin - usually about 8 units.
If you use gels, the pipes actually come in from outside the geosphere.
EDIT: Gantry, Truss, Frame, Wood, Underground. All good things to filter for in the model viewer.
this is of course assuming you are making an underground sphere chamber.
I would be very very careful with this. Areaportals that are in sight are expensive: they actively calculate what you can and cannot see. If you have a lot of them it can cause lag. I would recommend filling these holes up with skip and apply hint to the outer face. This is also optimization and it's not as good as areaportals, but it's a lot cheaper.
If you have a very open area where you can see inside 2 or 3 other test chambers you might want to go for func_details indeed.
I would like to clarify.... use AREA PORTALS!!!.. but only if you don't have like 20 in one room, because they are a bit expensive.... but totally worth it.... and always hint/skip everything... well mostly... just optimize everything you do!
For old aperture I recommend starting out with normal brushes. If you have like one piece where you can look back on the previous or next room an areaportal is awesome.
If you go over the top with detailing and making a lot of walls with holes in them and everything can see everything visleaves are useless since you can see everything anyways. In that case you can just make everything a func_detail and you won't need hints/skips/areaportals anymore.
Falconerd already said gratings: they also work to prevent a part from becoming painted! Using these can fix a couple of unintended solutions!
Check out this page on the VDC, some useful advice.
Also, what I generally do is play the maps from portal 2 over and over and over again, taking a bazillion screenshots of how they do everything as I go, to try and get a feel for how they create the atmosphere. Also, as I beleive was mentioned before, you can open the model browser and filter for underground, do this and then scroll through all the models that show up, can be a great way to notice all the little details and thigns that go into making that is truly spectacular.
I think in terms of boolean variables. Generally, it makes things easier.
Related to that note, when I made Upstairs Downstairs I made each of the three chambers as an instance. This meant that I could just 'dive in' and edit the puzzle without having to worry about all the other clutter in Hammer. (In fact, pretty much everything was an instance: the spawn, the airlocks, the disassembler, the light tower, the geodome...) There were some drawbacks though. The I/O system became more complex (to work around the vbsp bug with func_instance_io_proxys) - that's what caused me to release an overly bugged WIP release. Also, it took a while for Hammer to fully load the map when it was calling in lots of instances.
As one of the previous posters said, walls are 8 units thick. Wrap the edges of metal panels in the rusty squarebeams texture (search for squarebeams or framework in the texture browswer). Portalable wood panels tend to lie on top of the metal panels or metal framework props (i.e. lie another 8 units in from the wall or ceiling. Wrap them in the light plywood texture. Speaking of plywood, there's two main plywood textures: the blue one and a lighter one - these tend to get used for flooring.
Structures should make physical sense. Every metal panel should be supported somehow. The floor needs to rest on something. Ceiling tiles need to be supported somehow. This is particularly a feature of underground maps because everything is so destroyed - players can actually see what makes up the structure of the chamber.
If you're creating a very open map, use of func_viscluster might quicken compile times.
In the coop maps, new testing elements (funnels, bridges) are supplied by Glados from the surface. You can see pneumatic arms that support light bridges, for example, which descend from the top of the geodome.
That's all that springs to mind for the moment!
Co-operative: Lightspeed Upstairs Downstairs