While looking through the list of Portal 2 entities, I found one called physicsshadowclone. Conveniently, it's not defined in the FGD and there's no article on it. Anyone know what the entity does or how I could get it to work?

I found the entity while trying to come up with a way to design a new testing element. Essentially, there would a special cube (let's call that the shadow cube) in the chamber along with a static purple light. When the player presses a specific button, the shadow cube would teleport from its location at that point in time to the endpoint of where its shadow from the purple light was before the cube teleported.

So if that description made any sense whatsoever, is this even possible to do without any special coding? In other words, I just want some way to make the shadow cubes work, regardless of whether it's with that physicsshadowclone entity or not. It's simply that that entity might be a step in the right direction. If you help me to get this to work, you will be given credit in the map pack in which I plan to use the shadow cubes. Thank you in advance.

You should be able to approximate it with some geometry and trig by using the angle from the light source (which you would use an info target for) the top of the cube, and you should be able to calculate ray of the shadow, and I think you can do some raytracing in vscript. I think you would basically have to recode the shadow calculations though.

Soundlogic wrote:
I think you would basically have to recode the shadow calculations though.

Hmm... If it's going to be that complicated it might not be worth it. I'm still really a noob at Hammer too, so I probably wouldn't be able to get it to work.

physicsshadowclone is just related to physics calculations it has nothing to do with mapping.
And yes it'd require a script. It'd be pretty complicated to calculate.

That said, if anyone wants to use my idea, go ahead.

I might if I can get the calculations working. If I do I can give you the calculations. Might be hard to get it working with rotations of the cube though...

Soundlogic wrote:
If I do I can give you the calculations.

That would be awesome, thank you! If you do manage to get it working, as I said in the first post, you will be given credit. I wish you luck with that. Also, this should go without saying, but feel free to use shadow cubes all you want in your own maps if you get them working.