Portal Tunneling
The problem with that approach is that it also eliminates 40% of the types of puzzles and flings you can set up, since in most places where you allow two portalable walls, tunneling will break/skip the puzzle.
I was referring to this (which doesnt have a realy official name). No I dont think it is simply advanced tunneling:
Frankly, I dont think so. It hasnt bothered ME yet, at any rate. Its simply a matter of how hard you want to work as a mapper to make tunneling not feasible for your map. If you going to insist on placing your flinging puzzle in a place where it aids tunneling and lets the user gain an "unfair" advantage in some other aspect. . . then you didnt think hard enough about what the user is capable of, IMO. Shift the walls around some and make their tunnel not visible/accessible, put in fizzlers in a few key places, reorder your puzzles, etc. Where you place the puzzles may be affected, but not what puzzles are possible.
I only fling when a map forces me to - if I can skip it with a tunnel, I do. So far there have been very few maps that actually let me skip anything - it's pretty easy to prevent.
Wall-Climbing: Exploit. Should not be included as a required solution because it's simply a glitch in the physics system. Cannot be avoided, but can be made useless by small ledges.
Tunneling: Exploit. Should not be included as a required solution because it's an exploit based on portal travel time. Smart mappers will (if possible) take every effort to minimize the possibility of using this exploit.
Door propping: Exploit. Should not be part of the required solution because it's a bug in the door. Smart mappers will include trigger_push entities which push physics props out of the doors before they close.
Momentum build: Technique. Uses the momentum knowledge we have from Portal and puts it into a new context. Can be part of the required solution if the player is informed about it's presence.
But then again, that's just my opinion.
If you say tunneling destroys that many flinging-puzzles, we challenge you to make us one where we can not stop tunneling and still have a functioning flinging puzzle!
The engine is set to push the player out of a portal link when one end of the link is moved. Obviously, they were aware of the issue and tried to avoid it. If you say otherwise, you're an idiot. End of story.
Actually, If you listen to the commentary they say that they push you out of the portal because they don't wan't you to die whilst standing in it, They wanted to make the player feel totally safe with portals, because if you can be killed whilst inside one there will always be nervous players who dislike using them because you might die.
If you haven't listened to the commentary nodes your an idiot, end of story.
As far as tunneling goes, they must have seen playtesters trying it, and they didn't remove it so they probably thought it didnt compromise the game too much, they probably thought of it as a 'ninja solution' like the nifty fling in one of the early chambers with the upgraded portal gun.
By that logic, flinging is an exploit based on momentum.
If you haven't listened to the commentary nodes your an idiot, end of story.
As far as tunneling goes, they must have seen playtesters trying it, and they didn't remove it so they probably thought it didnt compromise the game too much, they probably thought of it as a 'ninja solution' like the nifty fling in one of the early chambers with the upgraded portal gun.
Oh, I have listened to them. Just because they say that doesn't mean it's the only reason. I mean... they had the same "problem" with Narbacular Drop... You could set a portal while looking through another portal. This exploit was heavily abused. Thus, this change was made where the player is forced out of the portal when another is fired. Didn't work too well, and for some idiotic reason people don't think of it as an exploit. Just because it isn't fixed doesn't mean it's not an exploit. The prop jumping technique still exists, because there was no solution. Maybe there's no solution to this, too. Ever think of that? Perhaps if you were shoved out of the area of the portal altogether it would make it harder to do flings or something. What about placing a portal right before you hit the ground? You would just be flung into the air.
So yes, I'm saying you're an idiot if you don't consider this an exploit.