Packaging a series of levels for release (in a mod)
Hi all!
So I and a group of my fellow senior Game Design students at Columbia College created a series of portal levels for a tournament our gaming club is holding. After holding the tournament and showing it to our department, we earned our way into a gallery for an end of the semester exhibition! So, we are trying to package these together in a way that will allow them to sit in a gallery.
I see the best way of doing this will probably be by packaging our maps into a mod. The downside is, I am not sure how to get a mod for portal working!
I've searched through the forums and found that not all too long ago it was not possible to create a mod for portal, but I've also seen posts that hint that it is now possible and that people are doing it. Can anyone help me on how to do this? The rest of the internet has not been very helpful on things specific to portal.
Also, just to let you know what kind of functionality we are looking for in our mod:
-it will need to be able to loop from the end of the levels back to the beginning
-it will need to be able to reset to the beginning after a certain amount of time of inactivity (people visiting the gallery will probably not play all of the way through)
-it will need to hold global variables that can count up which levels have been completed.
-it will need to be able to list credits at the end.
I think that's about it. Any help anyone can provide will be very much appreciated!
http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Main_Page
I am sure this website can help you a lot, it has helped me loads with mapping and texturing.
Thanks PortalFan, I've looked through that quite a bit and it will be very helpful for some of the specifics, however there is nothing specific to portal (beyond mapping tutorials, which is an area we have used profusely). I was wondering if anyone had any specifics as to making sure that all of portals textures, entities, and functions are in the mod correctly. We opened hammer in a mod we created off of portal, and all of the textures were missing and many of the entities as well.
The biggest thing you need to know is that you cannot create your own .GCF files, so you will just need to simply package all of your existing maps, materials, sounds, and models as they are currently into your ZIP/RAR file.
Ideally, a user should just need to simply extract the file and everything will go in it's place.
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Ideally, a user should just need to simply extract the file and everything will go in it's place.
OR he could z7 it, that compresses it really really well and makes a nifty little installer.
I hope this thing is as good as I think it is 
.
The problem is, that in order to create a mod, you need some programming skills and acces to Portal's source files. And though you can get Half-Life 2's source files with the Source SDK (not the source code for the engine, though), but not those of Portal, I have no idea how you could create this. Maybe the best thing you could do is changing the level index for Portal, that's all in external files in the .GCF-files, so that the level index shows your maps instead of the original Portal maps.
"Duct Tape is the answer."
Not quite.
Looks like youme's done something close. Might want to PM him.
I ment a partial or total conversion-mod, with modifying the way the game works. It is indeed possible to mod the game up to a certain level without the source files. I've tried it for SkyLabs, and it worked quite well. For example I could also adjust the colours and positions of the different elements in the HUD (all HUD elements in Portal for me are still Impact-font and lightblue-color, have been too lazy to turn it back).
"Duct Tape is the answer."