Puzzle Idea: use tubes to redirect excursion funnels
Remember that old game where you had to connect tubes by rotating smaller parts of bend tube to get a closed line from start to finish?
I wondered if it was possible to redirect an excursion funnel using the bent tubes available in portal, using some trigger to detect if the funnel hits one end of the tube and then triggering another funnel at the other end.
Maybe put the tubes on rotating panels, create a glass floor above them and put the switches on there. I guess actually transporting something through the "funnel-tubes" would be hard to do with the game mechanics, but you could just use it to get the funnel to come out at different places on the map through a grid, and use only the funnels above the glass floor.
Would be a fresh kind of Portal puzzle.
Feel free to tell me if this is possible and/or awesome 
-D
I don't think that you can use an excursion funnel to do that but you could just use pipes which can be rotated.
Tho it would probably take up a lot of space and if you wanted the person to think, it would require a lot of buttons...
I wouldn't give up on the idea though! I might give it a try 
msleeper wrote:
Excursion funnels don't work that way.
I know the normally don't. The question is: can they be made to work that way? Alternatively, is there a way to detect if an excursion funnel hits a certain surface and is it possible to create the excursion funnel "out of this air", that is without the field generator or whatever that thing is called.
If the answer to both of those questions is yes, then that idea is possible.
chickenmobile wrote:
Wasn't that game called pipe or pipes? That is old!
Pipes or Plumber, just looked it up here is a flash example http://www.flashrolls.com/puzzle-games/Plumber-2-Flash-Game.htm
chickenmobile wrote:
I don't think that you can use an excursion funnel to do that but you could just use pipes which can be rotated.
As i said to msleeper, I think it should be possible (albeit complicated). At least as far as my limited understanding of Hammer goes. Its basically an invisible portal on both ends of the tube.
Only using Pipes would work too, nice idea.
chickenmobile wrote:
Tho it would probably take up a lot of space and if you wanted the person to think, it would require a lot of buttons...
I wouldn't give up on the idea though! I might give it a try
I don't think it would be that bad, spacewise. You could get a pretty neat puzzle by only using 2 rotating tubes under the glass floor to redirect them and some fixed tubes that get the funnel above ground. That would be 2 Buttons (90? rotate per press).
I'd love to see this done, contact me if you got something in the making
-D
mickyficky wrote:
I know the normally don't. The question is: can they be made to work that way?
No.
mickyficky wrote:
Alternatively, is there a way to detect if an excursion funnel hits a certain surface
No.
mickyficky wrote:
As i said to msleeper, I think it should be possible (albeit complicated). At least as far as my limited understanding of Hammer goes.
Your understanding of Hammer is indeed limited. This would require major code additions, which we do not have the capability of adding.
mickyficky wrote:
As i said to msleeper, I think it should be possible (albeit complicated). At least as far as my limited understanding of Hammer goes. Its basically an invisible portal on both ends of the tube.
There is a way to make invisible portals but it requires solid brushes and non-moving point entities which would be too hard to implement in a 50-combination pipe game, in fact probably impossible.
mickyficky wrote:
Only using Pipes would work too, nice idea.
This way is probably much easier and would do the exact same thing as an excursion funnel tunnelling along an object.
If this were a Coop map, you could have a series of flat surfaces that gets moved around and you would have to 1.) align the surfaces in the correct way so that you can 2.) put your 4 portals in such a manner that you can get the excursion funnel (or gel) going where you need it to.
Flaming Lemons
On this map, there is a "walk in mirror", I tried to look up what it's called but couldn't find it. I think this might have been done with world portals, but lets just call it a mirror for now. I couldn't test how diagonally applied funnels work on this surface, but as far as i could tell it should work out the way needed.
If it is possible to create/manipulate such a mirror by pressing a button, the problem is solved too. All you need is a solid surface above the funnel level (to hide the mirror) and the possibility the add a mirror on the diagonals (or remove the mirror to get the funnel to go through).
Then add some decals to make it clear where the funnel can go in and where it comes out, i.e. something that indicates the orientation of the mirror.
That way we wouldn't even need something rotating (which i guess is a lot more complicated to do).
@ raulness:
The idea to use this with gels is nice, but i guess this is even more complicated. If the thing i mentioned above works, you could use funnels to transport the gels and have essentially the same thing. Thats why I liked the funnels in the first place, they are so very flexible in their application. You could use this puzzle to get funnels in the right place, produce cubes at the right place, get gels at the right place.
@ msleeper
I thought about that too, but 4 portals only give 2 redirections, and nothing is stopping you from "cutting out the middle man", i.e. don't do the redirection were funnel goes in portal 1, comes out at portal 2, goes in at portal 3 and comes out at portal 4 but instead just do portal 2 at the place of portal 4 (wow, this is complicated to verbalize, hope you get the message). You'd have to do 2 rooms with fizzlers to get that working.
And 2 redirections limits you a little.
&
msleeper wrote:
I don't think you could do it with gels, either, as they explode on impact of any surface.If this were a Coop map, you could have a series of flat surfaces that gets moved around and you would have to 1.) align the surfaces in the correct way so that you can 2.) put your 4 portals in such a manner that you can get the excursion funnel (or gel) going where you need it to.
I was imagining the tube through gels thing as more of an illusion rather than actual transportation. Assuming its a set of tubes against a tall wall that move based on button activation. If the tubes were solid and the player couldn't see whats going on inside them then maybe you could trick the player into thinking they're actually moving the gel around through tubes but are really just activating a trigger. Maybe only have one thats see-through near the top to show the player that its the source of the gel.
I don't know. Probably unnecessarily complicated and not worth the actual fun factor it would offer.
The rotating tubes would be nothing more than a visual representation of the logical path you took by pressing the buttons a number of times.
If there is a possibility to retrieve the number of times a button has been pressed and then do some simple math on that number this would probably be the easiest way.
If such an option doesn't exist the triggers might get very complicated as you would have to implement some sort of cyclical logic structure for every button.
raulness wrote:
A more realistic idea would maybe be having to make a set of tubes line up in a specific manner using buttons in order for you to successfully receive a certain paint gel.
So you would still need a funnel to transport the gel along? When they hit any object the blobs explode.
chickenmobile wrote:
raulness wrote:A more realistic idea would maybe be having to make a set of tubes line up in a specific manner using buttons in order for you to successfully receive a certain paint gel.
So you would still need a funnel to transport the gel along? When they hit any object the blobs explode.
Is there any physics entities that move gel? I.E. point_push, trigger_push, etc.
if so you could make a ring of pushes that force the gel to keep a line, or use a trigger_gravity to force it to go the direction you want. It must be possible since it's done muliple times in the campaign.
You may be able to use world portals inside of the tubes to generate the same effect. If you position the world portals at a diagonal near the center of the curve you may be able to redirect it where you want without it having too big of a visual impact on it. If you put the world portals square with the in/out sides, looking at it might be a bit confusing.
I'm not sure how dynamic you want this to be (hitting buttons to move a tube into place), but I'd think making the tube the parent of the world portal should make it stay in place. Or, just have it when the tube moves into the position its intended to be used in you just activate the world portals that are already in place.
Groxkiller585 wrote:
It must be possible since it's done muliple times in the campaign.
Such as where? All of the paint tubes have the paint spawn fairly closely to the mouth of the tube model. At no point does paint actually traverse through tubes.
msleeper wrote:
Groxkiller585 wrote:It must be possible since it's done muliple times in the campaign.
Such as where? All of the paint tubes have the paint spawn fairly closely to the mouth of the tube model. At no point does paint actually traverse through tubes.
I thought he meant that they pushed the paint to move farther than it normally should under normal gravity. I think sometimes the paint is guided onto certain surfaces, and it seems a bit wierd how far the paint flies sometimes.
I'm pretty sure that's what he meant.