xitooner wrote:
Is it just me, or did they also dumb-down or slow-down the turrets?

I might have caught this too, it seems like their response time has been increased by a few milliseconds.

Also, I'm looking forward to much more modular chambers now. It would be interesting to see a map like HMW's "Try Anything Twice" only with all puzzles in the same room.

Hurricaaane wrote:
Player1 wrote:

It feels like there's something going on with angular entrance momentum not being transformed correctly. It feels like all momentum is translated directly into "coming straight out of the portal" momentum.

This statement is false. I mean, yours.

Aye from the one fling you do do in that video it looks perfectly normal. Maybe it's the "funneling on the way out" that msleeper suggests (which would probably have some sort of "don't apply it if the exit angle/momentum exceeds a certain limit" type of deal on it).

Or maybe there are simply surfaces where you can add a "hint" to the direction to tweak puzzles. I'm not sure. I'm going through the game for second time now (commentary track) and there's been a couple of spots where I could've sworn the direction I'm exiting is wrong (even if just by 15 degrees or so). Unfortunately most of the single-player story doesn't really make backtracking much of an option so it's kinda hard to reproduce unless you save right before (oh, no saving under commentary track, yay).

Paul wrote:
It looks like objects have the same mass as the player now and fling the same distance, probably added for the faith plates, that could be quite handy. I hate some of the limitations they've added though, I liked those ninja chambers where you had to to all sorts of crazy tricks.

The faith plate seems to be a dedicated entity too, with a dedicated engine support. It seems it even has its own prediction algorithms according to some messages that are displayed in the console while in co-op mode. " Prediction will fail! Fix this in the map."

By the way, the Portal funneling is not available in the menu, but "find funnel" shows

] find funnel
"portal_funnel_debug" = "0" client cheat replicated                             
"speed_funnelling_enabled" = "1" client replicated                               - Toggle whether the player is funneled into portals while running on speed paint.
"sv_player_funnel_gimme_dot" = "0.9" client replicated                          
"sv_player_funnel_height_adjust" = "128.f" client replicated                    
"sv_player_funnel_into_portals" = "1" client replicated                          - Causes the player to auto correct toward the center of floor portals.
"sv_player_funnel_snap_threshold" = "10.f" client replicated                    
"sv_player_funnel_speed_bonus" = "2.f" client replicated                        
"sv_player_funnel_well_above" = "256.f" client replicated                       
"sv_props_funnel_into_portals" = "1" game cheat                                 
"sv_props_funnel_into_portals_deceleration" = "2.0f" game cheat                  - When a funneling prop is leaving a portal, decelerate any velocity that is in op

The line you're looking for is
"sv_player_funnel_into_portals" = "1" client replicated - Causes the player to auto correct toward the center of floor portals.

It's not tagged as "cheat" so it's okay. But since it's not in the menu, it'd be better to make maps taking in account that funneling will always be active.

There's also something to hide the portal helpers (seeing portal through walls).

] find ghost
"cl_portal_ghost_use_render_bound" = "1" client                                 
"portal_draw_ghosting" = "1" client cheat                                       
"portal_ghost_show_bbox" = "0" client cheat replicated                           - Render AABBs around the bounding box used for ghost renderable bounds checking (
"portal_ghost_use_network_origin" = "0" client                                   - Use the network origin for determining bounds in which to ghost renderables, rat
"portal_ghosts_disable" = "0" client                                             - Disables rendering of ghosted objects in portal environments
"r_portal_fastpath_max_ghost_recursion" = "2" client     

portal_ghosts_disable is NOT what you're looking for (say you have a cube that is 1/3 way through the orange portal, that means 2/3 of the cube is on the orange portal side, then the 1/3 remaining of the cube will not be displayed if you're looking at the blue portal exit).
portal_draw_ghosting IS what you're looking for, but for some reason, it is tagged with "cheat", but you can enable it while sv_cheats is 0. I don't know why.

There are plenty of console stuff to alter the game.

And as a side note, any map that fucks with console settings (disables funneling, disables portal ghost, etc.) is really gonna piss me off.

msleeper wrote:
re: The Faith Plates being predicted. If you go back and listen to the commentary for the "Advanced Aerial Fath Plates" chamber, it shows you they are 100% precalculated. They are also precalculated both for the player and for physics objects separately, since objects and the player don't always wind up in the same place (or so the commentary says).

Related: goo physics are not the same between the different goos. I've seen blue goo go farther through a portal than orange goo. Not sure what the reasoning behind that is.

msleeper wrote:
And as a side note, any map that fucks with console settings (disables funneling, disables portal ghost, etc.) is really gonna piss me off.

Indeed.

Player1 wrote:
msleeper wrote:

re: The Faith Plates being predicted. If you go back and listen to the commentary for the "Advanced Aerial Fath Plates" chamber, it shows you they are 100% precalculated. They are also precalculated both for the player and for physics objects separately, since objects and the player don't always wind up in the same place (or so the commentary says).

Related: goo physics are not the same between the different goos. I've seen blue goo go farther through a portal than orange goo. Not sure what the reasoning behind that is.

msleeper wrote:

And as a side note, any map that fucks with console settings (disables funneling, disables portal ghost, etc.) is really gonna piss me off.

Indeed.

I'm not sure, but in the official maps, the speed of the goo is visually determined by the height of the tube before it exits. On many maps, the height of the tube for the blue and the orange goo are different. I actually noticed that goo were going at different speeds, but when I looked at the tubes it was being made-up perfectly logic.

I'm not sure if that's what you were talking about.

Also there is some fun stuff to do, being discussed another forum. Just sharing:

4XLaFGPlpT4

Event though I drop down straight into the portal I exit at a slight angle in order to land on the right side of the platform. I'm not doing anything fancy midair or when entering the portal. It seems like the surface I'm putting my exit portal on is hardwired to give me that angle.

Player1 wrote:
This is what I'm talking about when I'm saying that fling angles are weird:
_89T6TEWldU

Event though I drop down straight into the portal I exit at a slight angle in order to land on the right side of the platform. I'm not doing anything fancy midair or when entering the portal. It seems like the surface I'm putting my exit portal on is hardwired to give me that angle.

Yeah, the level designs are pretty much made up to mask potential difficulties the player can have with the portal system, sometimes they really don't want you to fail "spectacular" jumps so they take a bit of control as it seems I guess.

It's like that part where you are about to be crushed by a dozen crushers, in this part it doesn't matter which portal you make to reach the safe rail; No matter whether you put the right or the wrong portal under your feet, you will be saved (the "wrong" would happen to lead you directly to the pit). The game seems to invert seamlessly the color of the portal on the safe rail if you happen to put the wrong one.

hanging_rope wrote:
This brings up a point: are we, as community mappers, going to do what valve does?

As in modify the path of the player to help them--that sort of thing?

I don't know. I can honestly say that the flings were much easier, but I can also say that when jumps are harder to maneuver I get a greater sense of satisfaction. That being said, as msleeper pointed out, near misses can be frustrating. I would do it in a map but not to the extent where I'm holding the player's hand.

hanging_rope wrote:
This brings up a point: are we, as community mappers, going to do what valve does?

I would hope not, tbh. One of the reasons that I do not like what Valve is doing is that it confounds the actual game mechanics. I, as a player, should be able to walk into a puzzle, inspect the different elements and, in my head and up front, be able to visualize how a specific fling would work. That's what makes it a puzzle game.

If I can't do that, it deteriorates into having to try every fling I can think of and see which one works. That's not a puzzle game. That's more like an old fashioned point-and-click adventure game where you had to resort to trying to use everything on everything until you got it right. Those kinda games do not really get made anymore for a reason.

The example I gave, in the cave where you first hear Cave (sic) actually took me much too long to figure out. Because the part of the platform that looks like it should be the fling receptacle (the little bridge strutting out) was not aligned with the angled surface. So on my first playthrough I ran around a lot to look for alternatives until I thought "wth let's try it maybe I'll clear the railing on the left side".

Much to my surprise I both cleared the railing and landed on the right side. At the point I thought that maybe my "portal senses" were just off after not having played a lot in a while. But after revisiting it I came to the above conclusions.

I can see why they do it like that. I've been watching a couple of "let's play Portal 2" youtubes and oh boy there's a lot of people that do not even think for a second but just resort to trying everything on everything. Valve's level design is obviously "good" in the sense that even those players will get the success of completing the game.

But tbh in my mind it detracts a lot from the experience; if I can't actually fail, if I can't actually get stuck for more than 5 minutes, simply because I know that trying everything on everything will get me through just as fast as actually stopping to think, then I do not get any real satisfaction from beating a puzzle.

Bah. Sorry for the wall of text. I'm just a little upset at Portal 2. It's just not nearly as good as I had hoped for :S

Player1 wrote:
Much to my surprise I both cleared the railing and landed on the right side. At the point I thought that maybe my "portal senses" were just off after not having played a lot in a while. But after revisiting it I came to the above conclusions.

Me too; when I first noticed it was when I had made 2-3 jumps where I could tell I was falling just short of target, but then was "magically" lifted and placed on the target. It was almost like there was some big breeze that lifted me up, or like some invisible hand just reached out and gave me a boost at the end. I have a feeling that when we deconstruct the map, there will be something present to make it more forgiving.

But at other times it wasnt forgiving AT ALL; like in the room near the end where he creates an exit by splitting a testarea in half. There was a cube that lands on some platforms, and I was trying (incorrectly) to fling myself up there to get it. I finally decided that it wasnt being forgiving because I was not SUPPOSED to be doing that. Thats what is so bad about that kind of "help"; in its own way, it gives you clues. And I dont WANT clues when solving the puzzle.

xitooner wrote:
But at other times it wasnt forgiving AT ALL; like in the room near the end where he creates an exit by splitting a testarea in half. There was a cube that lands on some platforms, and I was trying (incorrectly) to fling myself up there to get it. I finally decided that it wasnt being forgiving because I was not SUPPOSED to be doing that.

Haha yeah. I did the exact same on my first playthrough. I saw "hmm cube up there, portalable surface opposite, looks flingable". It took a couple of attempts (one overshooting and one undershooting) until I got it right. When I got the cube I thought to myself "that was actually kinda hard, it was probably not meant to be solved like that".

And lo and behold on my second playthrough it felt so blindingly obvious to instead use the portalable surfaces to redirect the excursion funnel to accomplish the same.

So not all puzzles have only one solution. I've a feeling the fling (when done right) is faster, so will probably become mainstay for speed runs (unless somebody finds a way to do without the cube).