Idea: Portal Multiplayer

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nathan42100
11 Posts
Posted Nov 23, 2007
When Half-Life 2 was first released (before hl2dm) many people found ways to play multiplayer. At first it was very buggy (VALVe's fault), but it got better, little by little. The projects have since been abandoned, however one may find the mods still floating around on the interwebs. I was thinking, I could possibly modify the modified files to make Portal multiplayer compatible. It shouldn't be very hard, and though I should be doing homework, hopefully I can have it done by later tonight, or at least a beta version of it. No guarantees that it will have a server list like other games, but you can use the "connect" cvar to do it. I however am unable to run a server because my router is fucked up, so if anyone would like to test, please reply. I can join however. The nice thing about portal though is that there are animations and player models, and hl2 has been around long enough that many bugs were fixed. And because Portal is hl2, you can use hl2 weapons in it as well. My only concern will be the fact that the game was only made with one portal gun so I am wondering if you will be limited to a maximum of 2 portals (one yellow/orange and the other blue).

Peace out till I am "finished with homework" (which I should be doing yet haven't even started.

PS- when I say later tonight, that probably means it won't be until my parents go to sleep that I start working on it. Being in the room next to them doesn't quite help the matter...

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Lorithad
240 Posts
Posted Nov 23, 2007
Replied 8 minutes later
Well, the thing with portal, is that it isn't a first person shooter. Half life was.

So you're either going to be killing each other by shooting them into the path of an energy ball, or making them fall into goo.

Or, you can make race maps. Or puzzles that somehow involve multiple people in order to complete. Either way, i'm not a huge fan of the idea.

I mean yeah, if somebody were to get something working to a point where I've got somewhere to connect to, then yeah, i'd give it a shot. I just don't see how it would be all that great.

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nathan42100
11 Posts
Posted Nov 23, 2007
Replied 5 minutes later

Well you could do these:a) have players spawn in 2 points and make it crucial for them to work together to reach the finish point
b) race, as mentioned before
c) give them guns, especially grenades and rpgs. just imagine throwing a nade to have it thrown back at you by a portal
d) race against eachother to finish the same puzzle
da) at the same time so you can steal each other's stuff
db) wait to do it and beat their time like horse or whatever
dc) same time but different places
e) make regular dm/ sniper only maps where places are only reachable by portal
f) etc

Take for instance something like this:

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/411045
Now I know it would never move that fast but really, knocking someone out and putting them in an infinite loop? that would be awesome. Too bad we can only make simple modifications without making really complicated maps or modifying the actual game.

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hamsteralliance
159 Posts
Posted Nov 23, 2007
Replied 1 hour later
I'd like some collaborative portal puzzles. I'm not super interested in portal DM or racing...but being tasked with puzzles that require lots of portals to complete would be awesome. Basically 2 to 4 players only - more than that would degrade into stupidity.

I can imagine several puzzles that would require more than one set of portals and I think it would be really interesting! You actually don't even need two spawn points...you just need more than one player can handle. There could also be a mode where you give one player the blue portal and the other the orange portal though I like that idea less - moar portals moar fun!

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nathan42100
11 Posts
Posted Nov 23, 2007
Replied 2 hours later
Work has started, coming along well...or at least as well as it can be when you can't "make a mod"
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Hober
1,180 Posts
Posted Nov 23, 2007
Replied 2 hours later
Meh.
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nathan42100
11 Posts
Posted Nov 24, 2007
Replied 2 hours later
Anyone know where I can get a bug swatter?
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mikebolt
14 Posts
Posted Nov 24, 2007
Replied 49 minutes later
what does a bug swatter have anything to do with it?
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nathan42100
11 Posts
Posted Nov 24, 2007
Replied 1 minutes later
to get rid of all the bugs, duh.
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nathan42100
11 Posts
Posted Nov 24, 2007
Replied 11 hours later
Download: dload.php?action=download&file_id=104

You might need to make an account to download the file

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youme
937 Posts
Posted Nov 24, 2007
Replied 10 minutes later
A collaborative portal would be the best!

TBh i don't really think that a HL2DM remake with portals would be any good.

What do you do with the fies once downloaded?

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nathan42100
11 Posts
Posted Nov 24, 2007
Replied 3 minutes later
instructions are on the download page
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youme
937 Posts
Posted Nov 24, 2007
Replied 3 minutes later

Quote:
Players going through portal crashes the game when maxplayers > 1

What the fuck is the use in that? its a portal multiplayer where you can't even use the portals

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nathan42100
11 Posts
Posted Nov 24, 2007
Replied 3 minutes later
One step at a time. Remember, we don't have access to the code...

And you can use the portals for weapons fire and phys props

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Wroth
135 Posts
Posted Nov 26, 2007
Replied 1 day later

someone needs to make a portal version of this kind of cooperative gameplay.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuurPVsn99A

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zaldos
18 Posts
Posted Dec 24, 2007
Replied 28 days later

Check this out.

http://www.portalmp.co.nr/
They have a video and a forum
Its gona take some time but they have the menu and the internet server for tests up. They want scripters and they dont want anymore testers they need scripters now.Its alot of work.

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mikebolt
14 Posts
Posted Dec 24, 2007
Replied 8 hours later
Bad link. What exactly have they done?
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youme
937 Posts
Posted Dec 24, 2007
Replied 31 minutes later

mikebolt wrote:
Bad link. What exactly have they done?

from the first video, not much, there wasn't even two people....not very multiplayer

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Adair
213 Posts
Posted Dec 24, 2007
Replied 1 hour later
Watching that video, this doesn't have to be a portal idea, but when I saw the one guy going through the maze I thought it would be cool to have the one guy in the maze and the other guy separated by glass on top of the maze and the top player has to lead the other player through the maze, and maybe along the way one or the other of them would have to press a button to open the other player's path up. It could work well in a portal multiplayer setting.

Edit: I was referring to the video link posted with the CS kz climbers.

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CodemasterJD
11 Posts
Posted Dec 26, 2007
Replied 1 day later
The 'rat in a maze' could work well with a 'reality show' where you have 2 teams, but a variable number of people on team.

Also, I had the idea of bigger buttons; such that would require say 2 people or 2 crates to stand on. This would actually open up weird strategies if you had too many people, as you could stack boxes up. The number of boxes for a lot of the levels would have to be roughly equal to the number of players, so if you had say 8 people, you could build a staircase. Careful layout could block that.

Of course, some people may 'kick the bucket' so the cube droppers would have to be programmed around this, i.e. dropping more cubes if a player dies. This could make for a tough design.

Also, how many portal guns would there be? If there was 1, then it's almost a 'lead the rats' type of puzzle.

== John ==