Valve has posted up a sneak peak of an upcoming "Portal 2 Puzzle Creator" designed to make maps more simple. As most of us here are seasoned Hammer veterans, I'm really curious to know what everyone thinks of it! There's also mention of a Steam powered map distribution system to allow players to more easily find and download maps. Here's a snippet:

Quote:
The simplified puzzle creator will let players easily carve out their creations in a straightforward but powerful way. They'll then be able to immediately upload those levels to their Steam Cloud and share them with other players online.

In other news, Team Fortress 2 is having their annual Halloween event going on right now. Our friends at F7Lans.com have setup Halloween servers to play on if you want some friendly faces to enjoy some TF2 with!

Lastly - TWP is looking for new staff members! Specifically, news posters and map reviewers for Spotlight and Roundup posts. If you are already active in the community and interested in helping out, post here or send me a PM and let me know!

I am will to work for you guys. i am 19 years of age, mature, and always looking for a place to help and i am very willing to work with twp. Hope to hear from you my steam name is [zG] Spud097 -ukh-

msleeper wrote:
If you are already active in the community and interested in helping out

spud097 wrote:
Posts: 1
Joined: Oct 28, 2011

Somebody needs to pick up some reading comprehension.

I actually saw the commented out code in the portal 2 DLC that came out recently, it was interesting... good to see that they didn't completely scrap the idea
and as for the easy chamber maker, you have to wonder how good the brush work will be, and if the maps will be optimized well... I think that knowing hammer will still be a great asset where it may be easy to make simple quick chambers with the "EasyMapper", then open them back up in hammer and put in all the little details we want.
I will definitely be getting it... whether or not I will use it much will depend on its quality

Edit: I'm also interesting in working for twp, I've never posted a map here, but if that's what it takes I could

I bet mappers could makes maps twice as fast now. However, I'm not sure if there will be as much "creativity" freedoms compared to Hammer. I'm thinking that I would use the new editor to create the basic design of the map and then use Hammer to add some more complex stuff. I doubt the in-game map editor could make this:

I'm assuming that, like the Alien Swarm in-game editor, you'll be able to export VMFs to use in Hammer. So this won't be as much of an all-in-one editor, as much as it is to create the barebones of a map easily and quickly.

I also don't think this will ever replace Hammer in skilled hands.

The first picture you post on the left is one of the official Portal 2 maps, but you might have already known that; the one on the right, I have no idea. The graphics for the map editor remind me of the awesome Portal 2 trailers with the stick figures in it. I think I see a few stick figures in the pictures.
I heard that it might be possible that GLaDOS will speak to the player in the in-game editor. Brace yourselves if you make a typo in the map editor.

msleeper wrote:
Valve has posted up a sneak peak of an upcoming "Portal 2 Puzzle Creator" designed to make maps more simple. As most of us here are seasoned Hammer veterans, I'm really curious to know what everyone thinks of it!

I've been asking for this since portal 1. Its high time this game become an easy-access community based game with a central hub wesbite fo instantly swapping levels and an easier to use editor. I'm thrilled and I bet we'll see the community grow by leaps and bounds.

So when this Hammer: Lite Version comes out?

For me, this in-game map editor is a good opportunity for beginners in mapping.
Later, they will start using Hammer instead of it and make more detailed maps. Just wait and see if this in-game map editor will be useful or not.

The in game level creator is a way for console player to create maps, instead limiting the use of portal 2, thats the reason they are simplified, console player never used hammer. Though I think that the level editor makes a bland "Glados clean" map, I hope valve will make underground, wheatley destroyed, or destroyed themes implemented into it.

I'm very interested in becoming more of a community contributor. I'm getting 200+ views and helpful comments on my map releases, I've written tutorials, contributed to the Valve wiki, and am very active in the mapping help forum.

I've moderated similar communities before, and would relish the opportunity to teach as well as review some of the gosh-darn AMAZING stuff that gets made here.

a good and simple editor but i fear lots of maps created with this new 'simplified' editor will be basics and surely uninteresting.
the central hub is a bad good idea. what about other mapping websites (this one for exemple) if players have all community maps on this hub?
same for the rating system, if it's basic (like or not) some really good and hard maps will disappear due to bad rating (average players don't like hard puzzles)

but, we are in valve time how many years before this editor comes tue ...

mooztik wrote:
a good and simple editor but i fear lots of maps created with this new 'simplified' editor will be basics and surely uninteresting.
the central hub is a bad good idea. what about other mapping websites (this one for exemple) if players have all community maps on this hub?
same for the rating system, if it's basic (like or not) some really good and hard maps will disappear due to bad rating (average players don't like hard puzzles)

but, we are in valve time how many years before this editor comes tue ...

thinkwithportals.com and steamcloud will be hosting console maps, unless you're willing to make a map in the console, then upload it to steam, then download it into your computer. Then upload it to THINKINGWITHPORTALS.com. Very unnecessary.

this will be good by making it easier for peeps to create maps and share them the mapping community will be much bigger, but i dont think it will replace hammer for the elite few that want to make extraordinary maps that makes my eyes water with joy O_O

I'm really looking forward to the new editor since I never really learned how to use Hammer. (I really should practice and learn how to use it properly.) Oh well, this editor might be a really cool thing if you have great ideas and a talent to make up maps. But unfortunately it will also provide easy access to trolls, people that can't solve the simplest tests etc... (Like in Little Big Planet where the most maps are a complete disaster.)
Hammer kind of sorted this people out because it is too much of a learning process to build some crappy chambers just for the lulz. I guess it will never replace Hammer but there might be some awesome maps built with it.

I think the new map editor can help ease new mappers into learning Hammer. I agree with the others that this new editor will not be able to replace the power and control over a map with Hammer.

What I am must interested about is how this Valve community map database will work. It would be amazing if they released a service that allowed mappers to upload a vpk and let any player on any system to play it. I'm sure we wont find out these details for awhile, but I have all my fingers crossed that they will make this happen.

Absolutely love this and can't wait to talk about it. Also, me and my friend, Zbot, would like to become staff members because we are the hosts of the Portal 2 podcast, ASEMBLE (Aperture Science Entertainment and Media Broadcast for Latest Enhancements) and we review at least 1 community map every episode. It would also allow us to find some more maps worth reviewing and help us spread the word of our show and some of the work here on thinkingwithportals.com. If you want to listen to us, head to our website at http://asemble.thepodkast.com/, where you can listen to me and Zbot, as well as a couple of our guest hosts like Comedian from vanilla.tv and Miss Stabby, talk about the latest things coming from Valve and the Portal 2 community. You can also send us an email at [email protected]. Thank you for your time in reading this and we hope to hear back from you soon.

I think that the new editor will have good and bad sides to it. On the plus side, we may get a good amount of mappers that had good ideas, but never took the time to learn hammer. Also it may be easier to make a rough design using this, then port it to hammer for experienced mappers to make the initial design quickly. But this will probably cause a lot of non-experienced mappers to feel the need to start dumping loads of terrible community maps, and it could turn out very bad. Also, it looks pretty limited, seems like interesting unique maps would be pretty difficult to pull off with that.

Also, I'm interested in becoming a staff member, I've been wanting a role like that on here for a while, so if you have room for me in there then I'd love to.

If I didn't have high anxiety issues I would have offered to help out, but sorry I can't.