Prefabs
I'm wondering where everyone gets their prefabs from, otherwise. I see them posted on an individual basis at the resources sites mentioned. Is there a basic Portal 2 prefab library that can be loaded into VHE?
Yes, I'm completely new to this, but I need to a pointer in the right direction so I can educate myself. 
zanthal wrote:
The new Portal 2 Source SDK isn't due out until this summer,
We should probably edit that thread title to remove the 
func_instance basically is an editor-only entity that basically says "Insert this VMF here during compilation and apply a couple modifications". You can even have multiple people working on separate parts of the map at the same time using instancing. func_instance_param and func_instance_io_proxy are used in the child VMF to set parameters you can change.
Say you make a box dropper. You've put a couple in your map(s) and then someone finds some sort of logic error. With prefabs, you'd have to go find every place you've inserted it and fix the logic error. With instances, you just open Boxdropper.vmf, fix the error, and all of your maps will get the fixed version next time they're opened/recompiled.
There are a few drawbacks to instances however:
* They aren't as customizable as prefabs. You can't, for instance, retexture one copy of an instance to be different from other copies. (That said, you can have individual control over just about any entity property using func_instance_param)
* There's some Hammer-level weirdness with nesting instances, particularly in regards to func_instance_param. I expect this will be fixed soon enough however, and it may be something that you can work around. Additionally, the path to the inner instance is evaluated from the map's perspective on compilation, but from the instance's perspective in the editor. This is worked around by keeping all your instances in the same directory as your maps.
You can get around the first problem by splitting your instance into two parts. For instance, I have two instances for chamber exit doors: One is the actual door, logic and entities to open and close the door. The second is the door frame. If for some reason I want a new texture on the door frame, I just copy+modify the frame instance.
I'm still scratching my head, trying to understand that if you can edit maps for Portal 2 with Alien Swarm's Source SDK, then what other Source SDK's can you use that are compatible?
But this is just so feel free to ignore.
Nightgunner5 wrote:
I set up Portal 2 as a new game configuration in the Alien Swarm SDK. No messy extracting needed, and I can keep my Alien Swarm files separate from the Portal 2 files.
Did you edit the Alien Swarm configuration? because there's no options to make a new game config from what I see.
I'm working off of this tutorial in order to get started: