a friend and myself somehow came up with an idea about a Portal 2 map.
The idea is that the Map is build like the Cube from the movie "Cube" ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0123755/ ).

How could the map be?
A cube is always little cubes put together to build a huge cube.

For example 3x3x3 rooms, that means 3 Rooms in each direction.( 4x4x4 or NxNxN)
That would mean 26 rooms + 1 mainroom. The rooms would be connected through doors etc. in every direction another room is. That also means some rooms would have doors in the ground and some rooms of course would have doors in the top.

How the map could be played/designed?

We thought of a pretty free-roam experience. There can be several rooms you could reach at the beginning, but each room contains its own portal 2 room"map" which either openes the way to another room or unlocks something for the main room.
So you could choose which way to go first or if you aren`t successfull in some room yet you can switch to another and go on there.

More Ideas?

Well we thought, one the one hand we both are not very well experienced mappers and on the other hand this would be too much work for a single person.

So we thought of something like a community map.

Everyone can design a cube "room" and dependet on the amount of maps designed there can be a mapper group which puts all these maps together and builds the mainroom and completes the cube.

And?

Well, i hope you, the community, will post their opinions and ideas in this thread and maybe we can achieve something huge together.

greetings
JPollock

And I played it.

but well, the map can get even bigger, imagine 100 people create a room for it...

JPollock wrote:
do you have a link?

but well, the map can get even bigger, imagine 100 people create a room for it...

the_cube_v0.3.0_jaxx2008

Player1 wrote:
...if a large even number is prime or not...

I'm probably missing a joke or something, but...ah...

This is a pretty good idea, by the way.

WinstonSmith wrote:
Player1 wrote:

...if a large even number is prime or not...

I'm probably missing a joke or something, but...ah...

From imdb goofs section for Cube:

Quote:
Errors made by characters (possibly deliberate errors by the filmmakers): When Leaven first checks the rooms' set of numbers for primes, she has to think for a few seconds for each set. The first set of numbers she checks ends in 5; the second set ends in 2. Numbers ending in 2 or 5 (other than 2 and 5 themselves) by definition cannot be prime. Someone proficient at math, as Leaven is, wouldn't need to think about the numbers; she'd register they were multiples of 2 and 5 and move straight to the last number.

I found the movie fairly interesting up to that point, but seeing the math-wiz struggle trying to figure out if an even number is prime kinda ruined the rest for me :S

And wow, really Player1? The fact that there was a screw up in the script or something ruined the entire movie for you? Learn to enjoy things and stop picking them apart for flaws. Geeze.

We already have a lot ideas for the map, some you already mentioned: moving rooms, prime numbers, etc.

But even if people will create alot rooms, combining them, and creating a mainroom with a puzzle that is connected to the most of the rooms will be hard. And the free roam experience which we are planning with will make the balancing and testing of these maps extremly complex, even without coop.

So, from our point of view as non-mappers, we think that if there will be more interest in this project, the only way to achieve something like this is to create a wiki or community based developer site, where everyone can do a part of the work.

Greetings

msleeper wrote:
And wow, really Player1? The fact that there was a screw up in the script or something ruined the entire movie for you? Learn to enjoy things and stop picking them apart for flaws. Geeze.

I think it was just a memorable goof being invoked as an inside joke relevant to the thread.

Hober wrote:
msleeper wrote:

And wow, really Player1? The fact that there was a screw up in the script or something ruined the entire movie for you? Learn to enjoy things and stop picking them apart for flaws. Geeze.

I think it was just a memorable goof being invoked as an inside joke relevant to the thread.

It was, however...

I have no problem ignoring the little things (like the space core orbiting wheatley) that have no bearing on the overall plot. However, the movie Cube has at it's very center, as it's very driving plot device, these prime numbers (and later on prime factors). I therefore have a serious problem when script writers get stuff like that wrong.

It's like if they filmed The Right Stuff, but instead of basing it on the actual rocket science involved in getting people into space, just asked us to accept at face value that they were going to waterski into space. Just because the prime number thing is less in your face does not make it any less wrong. Fourth wall gets broken, unintentionally, and that's never a good thing for immersion.

That said Cube certainly had some interesting puzzle ideas, so to try and bring this back on topic I think we need to consider the following:

1) I think we need to base this off the first movie. The first movie is the one that is closest to sanity so to speak. While the second movie (Hypercube) certainly had concepts that fit well with portal technology (heck, they're talking about quantum teleportation and go through portals and have actual portal like experiences) there's no real puzzle in that movie to figure out. Just some numbers that in the end don't amount to much. The third movie (Cube Zero) is more reminiscent of the first movie, but use letters instead of numbers, but they don't actually spend much time on the actual puzzle there.

2) I think we should not redo the whole prime-number factorization puzzle thing. For one thing I think it's actually very few people who both can, would want to and find it fun to solve that kind of puzzle. And for another it's not very portally.

3) I think we need to center on the concept of finding a way out of a maze that keep's rearranging itself, but somehow make using portals key to figuring out how everythings arranged. Now that Portal 2 can support portals on moving surfaces there might be an idea to leaving a portal inside a room just before it moves or something such like.

If so:

• How to proceed with this project? (creat wiki/dev page/etc..)
• We need a team of mappers, maybe designers. etc. My friend is a programmer, but has never worked with source-mapping
• Work out a plan, put the idea on paper, todo-list
• Collect ideas
• ..

I think that, if we really start this project, that the actuall mapping process will start with the official portal 2 sdk. the current mapping possibilities are too complicated to adress our project to a huge mass of potential mappers.

Let`s all hope that Valve will create a user friendly Hammer for Portal 2 and a lot more people might get into mapping.

Greetings

(Sorry for bad English )

i am not so into modding and mapping that i would spent my free time with it, well at least not with the actual portal 2 mapping situation. Why should i learn how to work with the Alien Swarm SDK, when the new SDK might look completly different.

if they make the new sdk user friendly i might take a look at it but at no chance that much time this project needs.

I just thought the idea was good and it was worth sharing with you. I also was ofc curious what other ppl would think about it.

Maybe my friend is going to put some effort in it, but i doubt that he has the free time for that either.

Well, everybody should be free to use thise for his inspiration and someone might even work on with our ideas.

Thanks for your time.

JPollock

JPollock wrote:
Why should i learn how to work with the Alien Swarm SDK, when the new SDK might look completly different.

if they make the new sdk user friendly i might take a look at it but at no chance that much time this project needs.

The new sdk will be pretty much the same, the only major difference will be better support for portal 2.
Thanks for sharing this idea, though.