Yet another 7 maps. Not all of them give the player clear directions. Some of this stuff is experimental and, as such, won't make a lot of sense. If something is overly confusing or unintuitive, please let me know.

Each map isn't long or complex enough to warrant saving, but I'd recommend doing a quicksave before you start jumping around. There is one map where I force a quick save in case the physics don't line up (happened once and I can't seem to reproduce it).

Some maps have elevators, some don't. Those that don't will transition to the next map after you pass the exit doors.

The final map has 3 variations it chooses from at random. If you wish to run through all the variations keep typing "map testmap_21" and running through until you do.

Start the sequence with "map testmap_14".

File Name: testmaps2.zip
File Size: 33.45 MiB

Click here to download [SP] Test Map Pack 2

&

I liked the color changing cube the most of all the ideas. Perhaps some kind of holders for the color rings can be designed to make them fit more in place rather than randomly floating around?

Meanwhile the level that confused me the most was the underground one with a skateboard ramp for speed gel and the pinwheel construct in the distance. I think the goal is to somehow reach the island with a button on it, but I do not see a way to do this, speed flinging out of pinwheel panels just got me killed.

I didn't know what to put the rings into. I'll give it some more thought.

For the ramp, apply speed gel along the halfpipe, run to the wall, run back towards the halfpipe diagonally to your left, then curve to the right and launch yourself off.

See here for the solution:

UtLptelHZyc

Oh, and there I was, lamenting the fact that we didn't have you and your genius on the forums, and here you are, under a different name! Anyway, on topic: the map pack was good, the concepts are interesting and I'd love to see more of them, but to what extent can these elements be used in proper puzzles? If you can challenge yourself to make some really challenging puzzles with these, you could go far.

FYI
You can complete the ferris wheel stage without starting the wheel moving.You can place a portal on the wheel facing the exit at the end of the ramp closest to the wall and then just run starting at the top of the half pipe.

Rubrica wrote:
Oh, and there I was, lamenting the fact that we didn't have you and your genius on the forums, and here you are, under a different name!

Ya...I go by a few names. But then again, who doesn't?

Rubrica wrote:
If you can challenge yourself to make some really challenging puzzles with these, you could go far.

I've been making maps that are hard to create, not solve. The entity work is easy, but there's just a lot of it for each idea. Perhaps I should revisit all my ideas again and, this time, ramp up the difficulty. After all, I now have the entity work done and, in some cases, packed into instances for easy usage.

I dislike difficulty that involves hiding things so you can just barely see them, timing so short that comes down to the half second, and having to constantly run back and forth through a map. So, I'm trying to find something that makes a puzzle difficult, that isn't one of those things. Hmm...

Time to go through more maps from the downloads database. Oh no, I actually have to PLAY Portal 2. The horror!

Oh, almost forgot: "But these are proper maps! "

benvent wrote:
FYI
You can complete the ferris wheel stage without starting the wheel moving.You can place a portal on the wheel facing the exit at the end of the ramp closest to the wall and then just run starting at the top of the half pipe.

Ah, Thanks! Fixed it now. I've made it near impossible to get a line of sight to the ferris wheel. I say near impossible because I can't make the shot or even see the white panel. If you fall into the goo, you can make the shot, but that's a bit pointless.

I won't release the update until I fix some more bugs, wherever they may be. If this is the only bug in the entire set, I'll be surprised.

Cool set of maps so far!

Rand0mNumbers wrote:
I didn't know what to put the rings into. I'll give it some more thought.

For the ramp, apply speed gel along the halfpipe, run to the wall, run back towards the halfpipe diagonally to your left, then curve to the right and launch yourself off.

Maybe I would have figured that out eventually. Instead, I portaled over to the platform under the gel dispenser, which has a clear shot at the wall you can portal to on the island with the switch.

My solution for testmap_15 http://www.weown.de/files/portal_2/testmap_15.dem.
No idea if it's the intendet version since i just use the lightbridge.

GreyHound wrote:
since i just use the lightbridge.

HA! I hadn't thought of that. I had the light bridge that high to make it easier to grab the cube off the button for the ending sequence. Those panels and the lightbridge have now been moved down to prevent that from occurring. It slightly changes how the end sequence goes.

pfalstad wrote:
I portaled over to the platform under the gel dispenser, which has a clear shot at the wall you can portal to on the island with the switch.

I...uh...doh! Fixed with a metal grate.

I'll be releasing an update to address these issues soon. Thanks for telling me about them!

Version 1.0.1:

• Added a grate to the halfpipe level to prevent bypassing the wheel.- Redesigned the wheel's panel holder designs to prevent bypassing the wheel.- Moved panels around in the Portal Sensitive Panels level to prevent easy button pressing.- Changed the cube that spawns when the second set puzzle is chosen in the final level to a standard cube instead of a reflective one.

Great set of maps!! Very creative ideas, we really enjoyed them.

From the unassuming name, and from peeking at the forum before trying the maps, we assumed this was going to be a set of easy unremarkable tests. So we were very pleasantly surprised to find all the fancy tricks. I certainly didn't think the first part was easy; this was the first time I've ever had to write notes to figure out a portal test.

The second part was a bit tricky just because there were so many changes to keep track of, but not too bad. The windmill was cool, but our favorite part was definitely the color cubes.

The falling tower was cool, but I didn't like that test as much because some of the buttons/lasers didn't have an obvious effect. We'd heard a click but didn't see anything change. Maybe that helped put me in the right frame of mind though.. After watching the tower teeter back and forth for a while, I finally said hey, none of this makes sense, let's try this. And it worked!

The lava level was a bit confusing because we wasn't sure what controlled how long the laser cube stayed on.. If it was a simple timer, at times it seemed much too short, and other times it seemed longer. But after a few tries and just trying to move as fast as possible we got it.

The last one with the multiple combinations was a cool idea although they all seemed pretty easy, which we didn't mind after having trouble with some of the other levels.

In short, definitely memorable and one of our favorites. Thanks!!

pfalstad wrote:
From the unassuming name, and from peeking at the forum before trying the maps, we assumed this was going to be a set of easy unremarkable tests.

I'm not very creative with the map names. I use a generic incrementing name so I'm not set in what that map is supposed to be. My youtube walkthroughs have the "proper" names for each map.

Perhaps "Experimental Map Pack (2)" would be a better name.

pfalstad wrote:
The falling tower was cool, but I didn't like that test as much because some of the buttons/lasers didn't have an obvious effect. We'd heard a click but didn't see anything change. Maybe that helped put me in the right frame of mind though.. After watching the tower teeter back and forth for a while, I finally said hey, none of this makes sense, let's try this. And it worked!

I'm not sure how to make the solution more obvious. I figured loud noises and motion in the center of the map would work. However, that doesn't exactly scream the solution, just that something is wrong.

I just noticed: The env_shake wasn't set to shake globally. Whoops. I'm surprised I didn't catch that before release.

pfalstad wrote:
The lava level was a bit confusing because we wasn't sure what controlled how long the laser cube stayed on.

The cube stays on for up to 15 seconds. If you charge it for 2 seconds, it stays on for 2 seconds. If you charge it for less than a second, it doesn't turn on. Give or take a half a second when charging for the i/o to stabilize.

If you watch the cube's skin, it changes for when it is charging, fully charged, and discharging. Come to think of it, the way my i/o is setup, I could do a color gradient for charging/discharging instead of swapping skins. I'm adding that to my list of changes.

pfalstad wrote:
The last one with the multiple combinations was a cool idea although they all seemed pretty easy, which we didn't mind after having trouble with some of the other levels.

In short, definitely memorable and one of our favorites. Thanks!!

The rotations make editing sections difficult. So, I tried to keep the sections simple. The more sections I have, the more scenarios I have to check. That said, I think I'll try for a rail system to make the assembly more interesting and keep myself from tilting my head in order to modify sections and allow for more complex puzzles.

I'm glad you all like the pack!

Didn't know you had some older mappacks too, time to play them

Here are my blindruns. However, I had some problems with maps 19 and 20, that's why I got no video for them. On map 21 I did 3 different runs as that map seemed to build up differently everytime I launch it.

map 14:
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(Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO76_6X7EUs)

map 15:
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(Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiG0ylpk7Mw)

map 17:
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(Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kn6TpHWBJkg)

map 18:
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(Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lBo7AlqxA4)

map 21:
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(Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5pSjbbsltE)

Woah...I haven't checked my other MapPack threads for a while.

For 15, it looked like you were having a ball enabling/disabling the laser. Also, that was an unintended solution. I'm not good at throwing cubes, so when I lowered it enough so I couldn't do it, I figured that'd be that (I think someone else did the throw as well...). Anyways, to see what it was all about, place a portal on one of the switching tiles and enable/disable the laser. Pretty much what you saw in 18, but didn't mess with.

For 17, the wheel spins. You get to the button by using the halfpipe as a, well, halfpipe. Run to the backboard, run back and shift right to throw yourself into an arc. I didn't try shooting the Portals from behind. I assumed since it wasn't a white tile, it wasn't portallable.

For 18, that first puzzle is a bit too...cumbersome. I think if you throw the green cube at the green button, you can sneak on by. I haven't tried that though.

For 19 and 20, what went wrong? 19 might have had a case where the tower would go the wrong way. I tried to prevent that, but it might still occur. I'd have to rethink how it works to eliminate all chance of it occuring. In 20, I thought I handled the serious bugs. The cube shouldn't be able to use the faith plates, the charging system should be relatively bug free (rapid charge/discharge), and there should be plenty of time to run to the exit. The biggest issue would be complete lack of directions. If the lack of direction is the issue, activate the laser catcher, wait 20 seconds, and cut the laser off.

For 21, I probably should have said 3 configurations. There were actually 4, but the last was unsolvable. This was a mapping exercise rather than a puzzle for players. I wanted to see how hard it would be to make multiple puzzles spawn randomly while still being solvable. They were all ridiculously easy due to how hard it was to coordinate each part. I even cut it down from 3 moving parts to 2 because of all the extra work.

Rand0mNumbers wrote:
For 18, that first puzzle is a bit too...cumbersome. I think if you throw the green cube at the green button, you can sneak on by. I haven't tried that though.

I tried that in a later run because I got that idea too. It didn't work though, the door closes when the button is "unpressed" and it doesn't even really fully open before the cube falls down.

Rand0mNumbers wrote:
For 19 and 20, what went wrong? 19 might have had a case where the tower would go the wrong way. I tried to prevent that, but it might still occur. I'd have to rethink how it works to eliminate all chance of it occuring. In 20, I thought I handled the serious bugs. The cube shouldn't be able to use the faith plates, the charging system should be relatively bug free (rapid charge/discharge), and there should be plenty of time to run to the exit. The biggest issue would be complete lack of directions. If the lack of direction is the issue, activate the laser catcher, wait 20 seconds, and cut the laser off.

At 19, that may be the issue. I tried it several times to make sure I didn't make anything wrong, the tower kept falling forwards (away from the catapult) and I found no way in reaching it to press the button then. Maybe I was just too stupid though, I don't know.
At 20 I guess the cube was supposed to shoot a laser, but it doesn't. It just sparkles like if there is a laser within the cube which can't get out though because it hits the cube's boundaries. So I did quit this because it seemed buggy to me. I'm not home right now, maybe I can make a short video later to show you what I mean incase it's not clear yet.

Djinndrache wrote:
I tried that in a later run because I got that idea too. It didn't work though, the door closes when the button is "unpressed" and it doesn't even really fully open before the cube falls down.

Oh good.

Djinndrache wrote:
At 19, that may be the issue. I tried it several times to make sure I didn't make anything wrong, the tower kept falling forwards (away from the catapult) and I found no way in reaching it to press the button then. Maybe I was just too stupid though, I don't know.
At 20 I guess the cube was supposed to shoot a laser, but it doesn't. It just sparkles like if there is a laser within the cube which can't get out though because it hits the cube's boundaries. So I did quit this because it seemed buggy to me. I'm not home right now, maybe I can make a short video later to show you what I mean incase it's not clear yet.

For 19, that's where it is supposed to fall. The glass broke for a reason...aside from a big tower smashing into it.

For 20, I thought I fixed that for it worked fine at release.
Okay, just tested it. The Super8 cube is no longer letting the laser go through. Not sure why. Replacing it with PotatOS works just fine. I might have to put that XSI Mod Tool tutorial to good use and create my own laser cube with the appropriate laser attachment.

How it was supposed to work:
p2Ab9u9y7jA

For map 17, I had to do exactly as Djinndrache did in order to beat the map, even though I tried turning the ferris wheel on. The reason I did not do the other method is because once the ferris wheel was on, it stopped allowing me to shoot portals onto it. I tried many MANY times from all different angles on the map to get them to stick, but it would not. So the only solution at this point is to not make it spin and do as Djinndrache did.

DeMarc wrote:
For map 17, I had to do exactly as Djinndrache did in order to beat the map, even though I tried turning the ferris wheel on. The reason I did not do the other method is because once the ferris wheel was on, it stopped allowing me to shoot portals onto it. I tried many MANY times from all different angles on the map to get them to stick, but it would not. So the only solution at this point is to not make it spin and do as Djinndrache did.

Weird. Thanks for letting me know. I'll have to look into this.

Rand0mNumbers wrote:
For 19, that's where it is supposed to fall. The glass broke for a reason...aside from a big tower smashing into it.

Then that is the problem, because the glass did not break for me. I tried to spam portals through the glass for a few seconds to find a pixel which may let a portal get through it (to see if it was partly broken at least), but however it didn't work. I used several quicksaves and quickloads, maybe that messed up with the tower and the glass.

For 20, that solution is pretty much what I got into my mind after being stuck in that puzzle for quite some time. Too bad the cube didn't work for me