Alright so ive been working on this for a while now, trying to get this down for use in Glass Prison... It's still possible to get stuck inside the tube, but I think ive reduced it as much as I can.

I decided to make all the tubes not solid, and instead build an invisible brush based collision frame. I also designed this tube so that you could predictably launch combine balls through the tubes. Press the button to launch a combine tube.

I used trigger_push for horizontal movement, and Func_door for vertical. Also for vertical there is a func_brush parented to the door, the two together keep you crouched.

anyways, let me know what you think

Movement Tubes Download

I've been grapping with these tubs too, and I did the same invisible brush frame, but I wanted the player to start by falling veritcally, which gave me problems because your not crouched then, and when changing to horizontal tubes you'd get stuck.

Yours seemed to work great, except when the energy ball went through it seemed to strike the wall outside the tube when it changed directions.

yeah thats probably an easy fix, but not too big of a deal since all turns in my map will be hidden from external view

when you want the player to do something like crouch, use a point_clientcommand and trigger it with an overide of "+crouch"

youme wins

Shmitz wrote:
youme wins

will there be cake?

youme wrote:
will there be cake?

The cake is a lie.
The cake is a lie.
The cake is a lie.
The cake is a lie.

that might be useful youme, the way I did it is rather easy tho, you're basically shoved into a playerclip elevator with a floor and a ceiling, as close together that you remained crouched. floor is a func_door and cieling is a parented brush, vice versa going down although I dont think it matters...

I decided that actualy using the model geometry is smoother, although you can get stuck on the connection joints, its more realistic than the ways you could get stuck with the invisible brushes. This also fixes how the energy pellets would seem to hit the wall but remain in the tube.

I updated the file download. its now a rar file with the .bsp and the .vmf so you can see what I did.

Haven't checked the newer version yet since I'm at work, but last night I fiddled with makng the tubes non-solid, and although it worked fine, the player's vision seemed to go through the tube walls at some points. I'll try it with solid tubes and youme's crouch thing...

Im finally happy with my tubes the way they're working, I'll only mess with the crouch trigger if I seem to need to adjust it or something... seems like one more set of triggers that I dont currently need

Works well, nice work.

Dunno if it was intentional or not, but the player moving through the tubes goes faster than the energy balls, so if you put a ball in there, then jump in after it, you zoom up and hit it and die.

completely intentional

youme wrote:
when you want the player to do something like crouch, use a point_clientcommand and trigger it with an overide of "+crouch"

Just tried this and it didn't work. Can you be more specific?

That is probably a pretty terrible way of doing it, I'd suggest going for the other methods.

I believe the command is actually "+duck". If you use this method, you must also use the command "-duck" when you leave the tube, or the player will be stuck permanently crouched.

youme wrote:
will there be cake?

No, sadly no cake for mappers who force players towards an action, even if its just crouching, there is no reason to force the player into a crouch, unless hes blind, then he shouldnt even be playing at all.

MrTwoVideoCards wrote:
No, sadly no cake for mappers who force players towards an action, even if its just crouching, there is no reason to force the player into a crouch

Tell that to Valve. They used a point_clientcommand to force the player to crouch on their movement tubes.

!!! Shameful!

MrTwoVideoCards wrote:
No, sadly no cake for mappers who force players towards an action, even if its just crouching, there is no reason to force the player into a crouch, unless hes blind, then he shouldnt even be playing at all.

I'm all against forcing players to do things but if you don't force them to crouch they complain about "I got stuck and had to crouch"

IT HAPPENED TO ME - I sent a map out to be tested and thats exactly what they said. so forcing them to crouch is a must

Yeah I can't see any other way of doing these tubes in my map without forcing the player to crouch, because the player does not enter them intentionally. Perhaps if, like in regular portal, you get in the tubes voluntarily, then it makes sense for the player to crouch before they enter. But not in my map :p