CamBen wrote:
Yes. You have to put it in manually.

Uhmm, no? I'm gonna' go with no.

I have been stuffing the basic instances in every map automatically so I'm not sure if this alone covers it, but I believe that for an elevator to work you need the instance "transitions/arrival_departure_transition_ents.vmf". Don't put in an info_player_start manually.

CamBen you trollin' or am I missing something?

FourthReaper wrote:
CamBen wrote:

Yes. You have to put it in manually.

Uhmm, no? I'm gonna' go with no.

I have been stuffing the basic instances in every map automatically so I'm not sure if this alone covers it, but I believe that for an elevator to work you need the instance "transitions/arrival_departure_transition_ents.vmf". Don't put in an info_player_start manually.

CamBen you trollin' or am I missing something?

oops. I was thinking that they meant they were going to make one without instances.

There is a trigger_once in the elevator that starts it up when the player is teleported in. The problem is that this trigger_once may activate before all of the other things in the map have fully loaded and initialised themselves. Depending on the size of your map, the order in which the entities load and the timing of the loading versus the triggering event, it may work just fine, or it may suddenly and randomly fail.

Normally the arrival/departure instance handles the player spawning, but if you don't want to use that, simply place your spawn point, along with the desired type of portal gun, in an empty room and let a logic_auto activate the entity named "@arrival_teleport".
A logic_auto does ensure that everything has loaded before activating, thus avoiding the race condition.

(* Replace "@arrival_teleport" for "@test_dome_lift_entry_teleport" if you're using the 50's style elevator.)

HMW wrote:
You should not place a player start directly inside the elevator. This creates a highly unpredictable bug that programmers call a "race condition".

There is a trigger_once in the elevator that starts it up when the player is teleported in. The problem is that this trigger_once may activate before all of the other things in the map have fully loaded and initialised themselves. Depending on the size of your map, the order in which the entities load and the timing of the loading versus the triggering event, it may work just fine, or it may suddenly and randomly fail.

Normally the arrival/departure instance handles the player spawning, but if you don't want to use that, simply place your spawn point, along with the desired type of portal gun, in an empty room and let a logic_auto activate the entity named "@arrival_teleport".
A logic_auto does ensure that everything has loaded before activating, thus avoiding the race condition.

(* Replace "@arrival_teleport" for "@test_dome_lift_entry_teleport" if you're using the 50's style elevator.)

Thanks for that, you may have just helped me out there! This probably explains why my custom elevator instances ive been using have had bugs, i was sapwning the player inside the elevator.

portal2companioncube wrote:
So, I put "arrival_elevator_a4_logic" in "arrival_elevator_a4_base" right where it should be. Will that work?

Yes, you need both of those, in the correct position relative to each other.

In addition, you have to either:

• place the instance "transitions/arrival_departure_transition_ents.vmf" (that FourthReaper mentioned) in your map, which has a player start in it and will take care of everything automatically

-or-

• make an empty room with a player start, a correctly configured portal gun and a trigger_auto that activates "@arrival_teleport".

Side note: I've hacked together my own version of the arrival_departure_transition_ents instance, which allows you to set the type of portal gun, title text and ending text / next map to load, all without extra entities or scripting. Should I upload that here? (I'm asking because I remember seeing a few modded versions in the DLDB already, which would make my upload redundant.)