Hello TWP, been a little while since I last posted anything (namely because I can usually find what I'm after with a bit of digging here, the VDC or interlopers).. however this has got me stumped!

What I'm trying to do is have a silent tractor beam effect that I can still control (colour change/linear force). Basically I want to remove the annoying "clicking/ticking" sound the arms make as they spin round. The beam sound itself is kinda okay. ((The tractor beam is in an area that the player needs to do some exploration to find but you can hear it from some fair distance away, and I don't want the player to find it by homing in on the sound. I want them to follow the visual beam to its source through a maze-like area to switch the polarity, basically I want the emitter silenced)).

I tried setting a SuppressAnimSounds 1 keyvalue on the prop_tractor_beam. This didn't work.
I tried setting a VolStart 0 keyvalue on the prop_tractor_beam also without success.
EDIT: I tried putting a prop_tractor_beam far far far away(the other side of the map in its own little box) and linked it to where it needs to be via a linked_portal_door. Didn't work, sound was still emitted through the linked_portal_door.
EDIT2: This actually worked but the distance between the linked_portal_door and the prop_tractor_beam needed to be at least 1024units long to make the in-map opening silent.
EDIT: I tried doing the above with a pair of linked prop_portals but the sound still gets emitted through the linkage.

I tried to create a prop_dynamic set to the tractor_beam_emitter model with SuppressAnimSounds 1. Success! - in part. Does not function at all like a proper prop_tractor_beam... however.. I could use this as a starting point with a few trigger_push brushes (or something similar) to keep the player "in the beam".. but I have no beam effect...

I looked into setting my own beam effect and watched a whole bunch of tutorials and guides on how to use an info_particle_system (in this case tractor_beam_core and tractor_beam_arm) but no matter what I've done with the info_particle_system (with regards to parents/control points) I can't get ANY effects to show up.

EDIT: I think I would need either a) a silent prop_tractor_beam emitter model or b) a working example of the info_particle_system with the tractor beam effects...

Any ideas/help would be greatly appreciated.
My thanks in advance,
RustyDios

This is sort of tricky and might be over-doing it, but:

You could fake the tractor beam originating from the spinner model. You can do this with prop_ portals. So, create your actual tractor beam somewhere far away outside your map, so the player can't hear it. Then, use prop_portals to make the tractor beam flow into the game play area. You can use props and brush tricks like you have already to make it look like it's really inside the map. There might be an easier way via outputs, but this is what I came up with from the top of my head.

Thanks for the speedy reply!
Unfortunately I tried out your suggestion (and another one that came to mind when testing yours) and that annoying clicking/ticking sound is emitted through the portal opening.
Edited the OP to reflect the new methods tested. Thanks for the idea though.

Maybe, try sinking the tractor beam far enough into the wall so that you can't hear it, then where you want it to originate, put a non solid, silent tractor beam model set to the correct spinning animation.

Have you tried putting the emitter very far away from the portal? Try making a nodraw room about 512 units long, with the emitter at one end and a worldportal at the other. Then it can beam through a prop dynamic. You'd also want a info_particle_system to make the blue/orange particles that come out of the emitter.

I'm not completely sure if this will work, and I don't know properly how to do it, but maybe using the prop_dynamic with the particles together with a trigger that activates a SCRIPT that makes the player fly in a direction and making the entire thing spawn by a portal once shot. Basically creation of the funnel with hammer logic ents.

Like CamBen said, putting the beam really far back then creating the illusion of it being closer, using particles and a prop_dynamic could work. Kinda like this:

Yeah okay. This is what I've done to get this working.
I have a 1024x128x128 corridor on the far side of my map with a linked_portal_door (set to a 64x64 opening) at one end and the prop_tractor_beam at the other. Then inside my map I have the other linked_portal_door set up just behind a prop_dynamic (with the model set to the tractor_beam_emitter).

The brushes surrounding the prop_dynamic are func_brushes set to be non-solid which hide the linked_portal_door opening, enclose the prop_dynamic and allow the real tractor beam to pass through. (Then I also have a playerclip and vphysics clip just in front to stop things going through).

It looks a little weird under close scrutiny but to the casual observer looks okay. Bonus is it fully works correctly and as expected, is still easy to control and now appears to be a silent tractor beam.

I guess I was thinking along the correct lines before just needed to extend the distance between the linked_portal_door and prop_tractor_beam in the little "outside map box".

I cant get an info_particle_system working to set up the tractor_beam_arm at the "fake" prop, so I guess I'll skip that.

PS I prefer using linked_portal_door's over prop_portals because they can be relatively unnoticeable to the player when set up correctly.

Thanks for the help TWP Guru's !

You can set the render mode of prop_portals to 10 to stop them from rendering, this also makes it so that there are no graphical glitches on low end computers if too many portals are rendered.