2017 Comeback Tour Mapping Competition

The contest is running from Saturday, June 17 through Sunday, July 2 Wednesday, July 5th. You've got 16 19 days to map!

Welcome back to ThinkingWithPortals!
This contest is a follow-up to all our fun and successful Mapping Competitions in the past. The purpose of this event is to promote & reward people who are skilled in puzzle design and advanced map-making techniques. We anticipate this competition will be incentive for level designers to bring their A-Game to the Portal 2 community to enjoy. We also hope this encourages newcomers to the content-creation scene using the PTI to challenge themselves to make excellent content with Hammer.

This year to further encourage the creation process. We want to promote you if you stream your creation process. Jump into the TWP Discord Channel #2017_contest and Post a link to your YouTube or Twitch account when you stream. Feel free to also drop a link in the 2017 2017 Contest Streams, where we'll try to keep an up to date list of accounts who stream their map making.

If you're interested in being a judge, PM BenVlodgi, or Stract on TWP.

The Rules are simple.
Hammer made only maps, limited to 1 SP and 1 MP map.

Detailed rules below, don't try to cheese the rules:
- Must use Hammer to complete entry.
- Maps made with the PTI will not be accepted.
- PTI/BEEMOD instances are allowed, however the level geometry must be designed wholly in hammer.
- Maps exported from the PTI will be disqualified.
- Entries must be fully mapped within the confines of the contest timeline.
- Do not submit entries that you started working on before the contest.
- You may update your entry up until the end of the contest.
- The latest entry to the contest before the end timestamp will be used for judging.
- No plagiarizing
- Puzzle concept and map must be your own original creation.
- Limit 1 Single Player and 1 Co-Op Map for contest.
- There are no restrictions on style of your entry.
- Group made maps will not be accepted, this is a solo competition.
- There will be separate judged categories for prizes.
- Judges may enter maps, but are disqualified from receiving prizes.

Submission instructions:
- Upload Links to Workshop hosted entries HERE. Do not use this category for raw files, only for workshop links. (We are having trouble with our mirror hosting links at this time)
- Alternatively, you can upload your compiled bsp and supporting files zipped up HERE for singleplayer, and HERE for multiplayer. Include #mappingcontest2017 in your description. (If possible, we suggest you use the workshop hosting.)

We will be awarding physical prizes, and Steam Keys to popular games.

TWP is BACK! Previous contests produced a huge number of amazing maps, and we are sure this contest will be no less! What are you waiting for? Get started!

Update: Check out the winners HERE

It has been a long time since the site went offline, and I am very glad to say that it is back and better than ever.

There are two main changes that our visitors can notice: 1.) The domain is now "thinking.withportals.com", with the extra DOT in there. I'll go in to why this is necessary in a little bit. And 2.) The site is now running on a TLS secure domain, which doesn't mean very much unless you are a stickler about privacy like I am.

As for why TWP went away and came back with a new weird domain, here's what happened.

In September 2015, the site went offline. There was an error with the company that handles my domain purchases, and although I did renew the domain and paid the fee, some how the domain still expired and was turned off.

When a domain expires it goes offline, but there is a short period where the owner can still renew it. Because of whatever happened, thinkingwithportals.com didn't enter this redemption period, and immediately expired.

It was then bought by a domain squatter - someone who buys domains just to buy them and/or extort people into paying for them - and there was nothing I could do about that. If I held any sort of copyright over the intellectual property I could possibly begin some sort of legal process... But since Portal is owned by Valve, I was pretty much shit out of luck.

I hoped that the domain would expire in 2016, but the squatters renewed it and so the domain sits on a parked page for another year.

So, why did the site come back?

ThinkingWithPortals, along with my personal website and a few others that I run, are sitting on a server that I own. This server started giving errors suggesting the drive would be dying - and I was not about to let 10 years of custom Portal maps die along with it. So I replaced the server's hard drive, reinstalled a new OS, and made a handful of other improvements. While I was doing this, I decided that I should try to bring ThinkingWithPortals back in some way.

It definitely wasn't easy. There is a lot of custom code that run behind the curtain to keep this site up in the fashion that it is. There are also about 300,000 links on the forum (in posts and signatures and whatnot) that all link to the old domain. Things like the 2012 Contest listings? Every link in that thread had to be updated. This process wasn't particularly time consuming or hard (I had some tools I wrote to help me) but I had to make 100% sure that every single reference to the old domain was fixed.

So that's pretty much the story. Will I ever get the old domain back? Possibly. I make damn sure to keep an eye on it when it comes time to renew. I would love if we did manage to get it back, but there's no way to know for sure. Will this new version be going away? No chance.

I have to run but I have some more thoughts I'll post up later.

Welcome back.

Sorry for the brief downtime everyone. There was a SNAFU getting the domain renewed.

All things are good; please continue testing.

Hello Test subjects!

A new portal mod has popped onto Steam Greenlight this week: "Portal: Outside Influence".

Quote:
Outside Influence is a mod for the original Portal; a new story set within the shared Half-Life/Portal universe, with new testing elements, environments and music. Contains additional features, such as fully voiced audio logs that tell the stories of those who worked at Aperture Science in its last days, a togglable hint system and a zoom scope a la Portal 2.

Check out the trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LaEwV2_6yQ

and head over to the greenlight page to vote!

Hello Test Subjects!

This new trailer for the upcoming Portal Stories: Mel got released yesterday!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwPkPCvy-GA

Check out the Steam store page for more information!