An interesting little something

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Pete
52 Posts
Posted Oct 14, 2011
Im not sure if this is a thing that people know about, or even if its new, but I was playing around with the gel sprayers just now and, well, Ill let a picture do the talking...

img
(pay no attention to the laser cubes)
Reflection gel! Its a shame about the missing texture, but still. There might be some use for this!

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MasterLagger
1,695 Posts
Posted Oct 14, 2011
Replied 4 minutes later
What color is the paint?
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Pete
52 Posts
Posted Oct 14, 2011
Replied 37 minutes later
Conversion gel white, unfortunately.
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Hzamd
61 Posts
Posted Oct 14, 2011
Replied 1 hour later
Does it have conversion properties ???
How can you spawn it ?
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Pete
52 Posts
Posted Oct 14, 2011
Replied 26 minutes later
No, and Im not completely sure. I know I switched the paint sprayer to paint gun ammo by accident, and that had the option of "stick" paint, which stayed when I switched back.
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Soundlogic
169 Posts
Posted Oct 14, 2011
Replied 1 hour later
Could you post a video of you recreating it?
I would like to take a look at this.
Thank you,
Sound Logic
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Vordwann
767 Posts
Posted Oct 14, 2011
Replied 5 minutes later
Also, I'm sure someone could make a custom texture for the gel once we all know how it works.
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Soundlogic
169 Posts
Posted Oct 14, 2011
Replied 2 minutes later
Apparently omnicoder has a source where we might be able to get some more info about how the gels are coded.
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beecake
484 Posts
Posted Oct 14, 2011
Replied 1 minutes later
There is an instance which makes "Stick gel". I never found out what it did... It was (when it came out) white and sparkling...
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Brainstatic
219 Posts
Posted Oct 14, 2011
Replied 12 minutes later
I tested it, and it does not convert non-portalable surfaces to portalable ones. Ignoring the color change and added reflection effect, it behaves exactly like the sticky gel did before the update. Objects coated in propulsion gel won't slide along this reflection gel on the ground, and objects coated in the reflection gel won't slide along propulsion gel on the ground. Interesting. At any rate, it seems to have replaced the old adhesion gel.
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Random
171 Posts
Posted Oct 14, 2011
Replied 51 minutes later

That's neat.
The blobs appear as pure white to me instead of the missing texture purple and black. The screen turned kind of orange when I was under it. And is it just the lighting or is it more silver than conversion gel white? EDIT: nope, they're the same, it was the light.

http://steamcommunity.com/id/Randomiser ... 0836748591

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Brainstatic
219 Posts
Posted Oct 14, 2011
Replied 5 minutes later

Random wrote:
And is it just the lighting or is it more silver than conversion gel white?

Try comparing it to some conversion gel in the same room.

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spongylover123
944 Posts
Posted Oct 14, 2011
Replied 3 hours later
There are many gels
There actually 11 (use info_paint_sprayers)
Bounce
Speed
Portal
Erase
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
Experiment with them.
The gel with the numbers, may crash the game
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Omnicoder
299 Posts
Posted Oct 14, 2011
Replied 4 minutes later

spongylover123 wrote:
There are many unreleased gels
There actually 11 (use info_paint_sprayers)
Bounce
Speed
Portal
Erase
0
1
2
3
4
5
6

The gel with the numbers, may crash the game

There are much more then 11. About 4,294,967,296 on 32-bit windows. You can type in just about any number. I wouldn't rely on these results as you're basically exploiting a buffer overflow in an array access.

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spongylover123
944 Posts
Posted Oct 14, 2011
Replied 2 minutes later

Omnicoder wrote:
spongylover123 wrote:

There are many unreleased gels
There actually 11 (use info_paint_sprayers)
Bounce
Speed
Portal
Erase
0
1
2
3
4
5
6

The gel with the numbers, may crash the game

There are much more then 11. About 4,294,967,296 on 32-bit windows. You can type in just about any number. I wouldn't rely on these results as you're basically exploiting a buffer overflow in an array access.

That means there's gel for every color in the world. Hmm interesting, more tag. Though what number was Pete using

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nychold
18 Posts
Posted Oct 14, 2011
Replied 21 minutes later
Technically there are only 16,777,216 colors in 32 bit color space. The other 8 bits relate how opaque the color is. :smile:
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spongylover123
944 Posts
Posted Oct 16, 2011
Replied 2 days later
I found it, mine didn't reflect anything and it was grey, though when it was spraying, the texture wasn't missing, instead, it looked like a conversion gel color
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HMW
806 Posts
Posted Oct 17, 2011
Replied 19 hours later

spongylover123 wrote:
That means there's gel for every color in the world. Hmm interesting, more tag. Though what number was Pete using

nychold wrote:
Technically there are only 16,777,216 colors in 32 bit color space. The other 8 bits relate how opaque the color is. :smile:

The number don't encode colours though, they are like row numbers in a table that holds the gel data. What Omnicoder means is that the other numbers will produce arbitrary, nonsensical results, as the data at that position in memory is not meant to be used for specifying gel properties.

To clarify, imagine that you make a table on a piece of paper of all the gel properties, like this:

| colour | effect | portals |
-----------------------------
| blue   | bounce | no      |
| orange | speed  | no      |
| white  | none   | yes     |
| clear  | none   | no      |
-----------------------------

Each row on the paper is 1 centimeter tall.

To look up a gel, you take the number and move that many centimeters down from the top of your piece of paper. So for the conversion gel, which is 2 in our example (bounce is 0), you end up 2 cm down on the table (relative to row 0), which is the correct place for the conversion gel row and voila, you got all the right properties for it.

No imagine looking up number 100. You go 100 centimeters (1 meter!) 'down', past the bottom of your piece of paper, and off your desk. You'll end up trying to figure out if that piece of lint on the floor means that this type of gel is portal-enabled :smile:

This is effectively what happens in the computer's memory. The larger numbers point to a spot that's outside the intended area an to whatever stuff might be at that location. It could also land on an area of memory that is not currently in use by Portal, which will crash the game.

tl;dr: if you use these numbers, be prepared for unexpected weirdness that may even change between different versions of the game engine.