I never mapped before. i really want to because i have all sorts of odd things i'd like to try... i think since i'm probably not going to become proficient at mapping this afternoon, i think i ought to let some of my ideas off my chest. so..

1. i would like to see a room with no floor, but maybe some really long walls, one side portable, one not, where the only way to navigate across, is to make a series of portals in the same wall you're in, and hop from one to the next, carefully shooting as you're sticking half way out each portal. maybe there'd be turns in the very long tall room, so you really have to perfect this technique.

2. not only can you get into some of the offices, but you also get to go outside. you see the moon. you just for the heck of it shoot at it, then you find you can go onto the lunar surface. or you shoot somewhere into space, and find you are in space.

OPEN THE POD BAY DOORS HAL

1. you can get into a 2001 style space station with curving floors and strange gravity... the rotational type...

HAL voice... (i can do that voice if anybody wants)

zero gravity/altered gravity/micro gravity

slow motion...

buttons to change gravity... or other triggers.... object puzzles that are affected by this...

too bad water doesn't flow in this engine... it would be cool to fill and empty rooms making them possible to enter or not...

also there could be some potable water rooms....

1. back to earth... then... scavenger hunt (i'd mentioned this in some other post)

even if you had a level that would take you outside just for a bit to find some objects you need... gnome?

1. back to the test chamber. it has to feel good to return to the bosom of aperture labs...

ya my ideas are usually bigger than my ability to implement them, but i'm sure there's somebody here who is lacking ideas but can implement anything.

Seeing as how i'm not sure if it can be done, I'd love to see an altered gravity chamber. It could very well change the entire way you'd need to navigate.

Lorithad wrote:
Seeing as how i'm not sure if it can be done, I'd love to see an altered gravity chamber. It could very well change the entire way you'd need to navigate.

Go outside or behind the scenes

gravity manipulation is easy... trigger_gravity set to 0.5 for low grav, 2 for high grav or -1 for anti-grav

Test Subject #13 dabbles into gravity manipulation

youme wrote:
Go outside or behind the scenes

gravity manipulation is easy... trigger_gravity set to 0.5 for low grav, 2 for high grav or -1 for anti-grav

But didn't another thread conclude with anti/sideways-gravity making you walk on your head on the ceiling/laying on your side against the walls, as the feet always tries to point towards the original floor?

there was a flash game i saw... i have to find it. where you have a gun that shoots a gravitational anomaly field, where you define a direction for gravity to flow, then shoot. sort of like maybe a click, drag, unclick. type move.

i think that a chamber with various different gravitational situations in it all at the same time, could be really fun. for example, if dr. Freeman happened to be working on a micro white dwarf, which floats in the center of a room, and all gravity points towards it...... ok maybe that's not in the engine heh...

so i guess you can make the gravity variable = 0 then? so everything just floats around.

if you read the book Ender's game there are all sorts of zero gravity battles fought by cadets on a space station. and yes it would be lots of fun to explore such a space, with lots of balls, cubes, and various other things floating around...

but can you make a room that is like a large wheel, like a space station in 2001, where gravity is along the outside of a large circle? gets weaker towards the center areas? can be utilized to make very interesting and odd maneuvers?

youme wrote:
Go outside or behind the scenes

gravity manipulation is easy... trigger_gravity set to 0.5 for low grav, 2 for high grav or -1 for anti-grav

Test Subject #13 dabbles into gravity manipulation

can i change the gravity from the console for an existing map?

iamafractal wrote:
can i change the gravity from the console for an existing map?

not that i know of

iamafractal wrote:
so i guess you can make the gravity variable = 0 then? so everything just floats around.

if you read the book Ender's game there are all sorts of zero gravity battles fought by cadets on a space station. and yes it would be lots of fun to explore such a space, with lots of balls, cubes, and various other things floating around...

but can you make a room that is like a large wheel, like a space station in 2001, where gravity is along the outside of a large circle? gets weaker towards the center areas? can be utilized to make very interesting and odd maneuvers?

Adding the gravity gun would be quite fun with zero gravity (I guess it's possible, is it not?), though it would make a lot of cube-puzzles meaningless. As for the gravity wheel, you can always make a rotating room with a func_rotate (or something )

I vote more difficult puzzles, because i want Portal to be a puzzle game rather than a flinging game.

I picked "going outside" from the poll...though in addition to that I would like to see more impressive-looking puzzles and tricks. they don't necessarily have to be more difficult but it should look cooler while you're doing them...such as:

1. Being launched across a football field-sized room. Large rooms, vast chasms, huge falls. The RenStrike's maps got the big-ass room thing going on and that was pretty cool...if only you had to plunge into the darkness.

2. Or being launched into Low-Gravity / Slow-Mo Goo, in which you need you re-align yourself and place a portal down a narrow hallway before you come flying out the other end of the goo. (Remember in the original Unreal Tournament the floating pyramid level?)

3. Contraptions of doom! Crushing ceilings, trash compactors, splitting floors, laser fields and swinging pendulums. They had some crusher machines in the escape portions of Portal but they were completely harmless. I'd like some potential harm to go with my confusing puzzle.

4. Water. Was there any water in Portal? That is...clear water that doesn't kill you. I don't think there was.

5. Rooms that don't have lights until you figure out how to activate the lighting. Or just rooms with very little lighting. I'm imagining a level where you have a glowing companion cube and you have to use it as a light to figure out where you're going. Perhaps even setting it on an one-way unstationary scaffold to have it go ahead of you and light up a path so you can shoot a portal over there.

stuff.

In short I'd just like more variety and more interesting situations that look cool while not pissing me off over how difficult they are. I'd think the difficulty of the Advanced chambers was pretty good. A bit harder would be fine...I just don't want to be stuck in a chamber for two hours.

espen180 wrote:
I vote more difficult puzzles, because i want Portal to be a puzzle game rather than a flinging game.

I voted more difficult puzzles because flinging can be puzzles too

The poll options could use normalization.

Ninja solutions are a subset of skill tricks.

Puzzles-involving-gravity and puzzles-involving-collecting-objects are types of more difficult puzzles.

A more useful poll would be:
Are you most interested in maps with:
Logic Puzzles
Hand-eye challenges such as complicated flings
Settings other than the Aperture Science interior
?

Quote:
Are you most interested in maps with:
Logic Puzzles
Hand-eye challenges such as complicated flings
Settings other than the Aperture Science interior?

yes please

I was actually planning something like this, only the story would be you flung yourself too hard and a fan blows you out a tube and into space... and you land on an asteroid, which rotates and you have to solve puzzles on it.

hm... i see the collecting objects idea isn't so popular. maybe that comes from hours and hours spent looking for that last mario coin or last dk banana... hm maybe banjo kazooie was the worst perpetrator with those puzzle pieces. ok we can lay that to rest. heh.

in the mean time, i'd like to see more logical puzzles... multiple and/or/nand/not etc. buttons to accomplish something... or some kind of rube goldberg contraption would be fun.

i think that to have a difficult puzzle is fun as long as its at least fair.

i don't like time constraints, until after i've figured out a puzzle, and am just trying to hone my athletic portal skills.

I voted for more difficult puzzles, but what I really want are more difficult challanges. After figuring out the way to get to the end of a map I want to get gold in all three categories (challange mode is hopefully included). Normally I just go through the map again and, knowing the intended way to solve the puzzles, don't waste time, portals or steps, going somewhere I don't have to go, which is easily enough to get gold.

I prefer to look for different ways of solving the puzzles, which are harder to execute or find than the intended but allow me to save another portal/step/second and when I finally found enough of those tricks, I'd be rewarded with gold. Those unintended solutions probably exist in most maps without trying as sideeffects of the intended solution and mapdesign, you'd just have to find them and include them in challanges.
An example would be Myst_one. Ok the mapper didn't know how to get the golds when implementing the challenges, but I felt really great after aquiring all of them

Puzzles, man, puzzles! Reasoning over twitch any day.

I can't see how going outside will work tbh. I imagine the first thing anyone would do with an outdoor area and a portal gun is see how quickly they can break the map by flinging/portalling outside the intended play area, which would be very easy unless you put really high walls and shudder invisible barriers everywhere, at which point it might aswell just be an indoors environment.

I voted for more difficult puzzles. You can never run out of interesting ideas if you put your mind to it.

Wroth wrote:
I can't see how going outside will work tbh. I imagine the first thing anyone would do with an outdoor area and a portal gun is see how quickly they can break the map by flinging/portalling outside the intended play area, which would be very easy unless you put really high walls and shudder invisible barriers everywhere, at which point it might aswell just be an indoors environment.

I'd love to see some outdoors stuff (even though I voted for puzzles). There's plenty of creative solutions that don't have to use invisible walls. Like, for example, a level set on top of a flat-top mountain (you know those rocky mountains / wild west ish thingies... no I've never been there so only know them from movies). That would solve the whole "flinging out of the map" quite neatly (by killing players off but not in a bad way, they selected it for themselves).

It could even be extended with actually having to fling from rock to rock!

You've just given me a great idea for a map and I must now leave.

Away! fleee