This is my first post here, so hi everyone. Anyway, I'm making a map that's a bit of a departure from the normal setting of Portal, and I've found that the player in Portal is just too strong. After much Googling, I have not come up with only half solutions. I could modify the player entity to have less health, but I cannot find out how to do that. I could modify the Dedicated Console Variable for the NPC's damage, but I don't know how to do that either. I suppose it would also work to decrease the rate at which damage is recovered. Anyone care to shed any light on this?

Additionally, and less importantly, it seems that some sounds have not carried over from HL2- I can find them in the sound list, and set an ambient_generic to play them, and they work, but the NPCs that are suppose to make the sound won't. What gives?

If you want to change the settings of portal, you have to make a mod. If you make a trigger_hurt, it will work but the damage will recover. So it is useless.

Use this command to stop health regenerating:

sv_regeneration_wait_time 7200

Means you have to not get hurt for 2 hours to regenerate health.
You also have to have sv_cheats set to 1.

Thanks for the help. For the 2 hr regeneration one, (that may be just slightly too long, i was thinking around 1 hr 55 mins) is there a way to get that command to run whenever the map is loaded?

Yea. use a point_clientcommand entity, and give it the input from a logic_auto:
OnMapLoad
clientcommand name here
Command
sv_cheats 1
0
0.00
-------AND-------
OnMapLoad
clientcommand name here
Command
sv_regeneration_wait_time 7200
0.05
-------AND!!-----
OnMapLoadclientcommand name here
Command
sv_cheats 0
0.10

BUT! This will be a permenant change UNLESS! you give the same string of commands there, but changing a few key things.
1)change sv_regeneration_wait_time 7200 to whatever it normally is
2)changing the logic_auto to a logic_relay to output these commands BEFORE the map is finished. ideally, you would follow these all with the fadeout command and then dissconect. You must make it CLEAR that if the player wishes to exit early, then they must reset these BY THEMSELVES. lest we get a bunch of angry german portal players running around youtube

Hope I didn't mess up anything! I didn't actually test this, just using experience.

I read somewhere that if you place the player inside a trigger hurt that is set to zero that it will prevent the player's health from regenerating while they are in the trigger.

Please tell me if I am wrong.

It seems that sv_regeneration_wait_time doesn't do anything. I tried using it (with sv_cheats set to both 0 and 1, just to be sure) and it didn't change anything. However, I was able to modify a variable that controls how much damage the NPC does to the player, so using the point_clientcommand with a logic_auto works! And whats more, if you load another map, then it goes back to it's default value automatically! Thanks a bunch!

Well, having it automatically reset will make this easier! Just make sure that if you have more than one map you put one in every... map.

And glad I could help. +1 for finding the variables!

correct me if i'm wrong, but couldn't sv_regeneration_wait_time be set to -1, which is "never" in hammer speak?

also, 8 replies (including mine) without a mod response? must be some kind of record.

Ok now back to the other problem. It seems as though a lot of audio from HL2 is unusable in portal, most notably the soundscapes and npc sounds. Is there any way to get this into a Portal map, aside from creating an entirely new mod?

well, you need the sounds.manifest file from HL2, but the problem is you must include it with your map. You cannot 'zip' it into the map file, that's not yet supported, and if you include it externally, the file will be used by the entire game, resulting in issues when playing other maps. But they're working on a method to allow for inclusion of manifest file in map files.

Neat stuff. So who are "they" and is there any indication when they'll have it working?

"They" means Valve's SDK department. Apparently the code has already been written, but the ETA for inclusion is "unknown".

Slightly more info here.