I had an idea earlier about information for here and the Wiki. There are a lot of quick fixes and simple setups to do things for Portal maps that don't necessarily warrant a full tutorial, but are useful enough information that they should be kept somewhere.

So, let's get a general FAQ going here. I'll be relaying the relevant information to a Wiki article once we get a few good tid-bits of information, so for now let's just keep it in this thread.

Post a question if you have one, or if you know of a common problem, post the question and the solution.

EDIT - Wiki article online! Here is a link to the wiki - Read it and be informed!

http://wiki.thinkingwithportals.com/wik ... apping_FAQ

EDIT - This thread will be cleaned up often! If you had a question that was here and is now missing, check the wiki article since it was probably moved there.

Cubemaps are too broad of a topic, and aren't Portal-specific.

As youme said, the cube tubes should have a full tutorial really as they're not a simple or quick thing.

Speaking of clip brushes of sorts, I tried to make a rocket turret that retracted into the floor (similar to the Glados fight), but when I did that, I was able to clip into it with my player, cubes, regular turrets, etc. So, I tried putting a func_brush with Clip, Player Clip, and then again with NPC Clip, but in every case the rocket turret was still clippable.

Would func_clip_vphysics succeed where these others have failed?

volt wrote:
Speaking of clip brushes of sorts, I tried to make a rocket turret that retracted into the floor (similar to the Glados fight), but when I did that, I was able to clip into it with my player, cubes, regular turrets, etc. So, I tried putting a func_brush with Clip, Player Clip, and then again with NPC Clip, but in every case the rocket turret was still clippable.

Would func_clip_vphysics succeed where these others have failed?

No, no. All you would have to do for that is disable it.

Cleaned up the topic, updated the wiki article, Keep posting your common FAQ's!

Cleaned up again.

Does the boxes spawned by the cube dropper share the same name as the entity for spawning?

For 'how to make basic & advanced entities' I advise mappers to look up the Portal Prefab package posted somewhere here on the forums.
They are very usefull to figuring out how things work, besides giving you an easy and quick to use button, door, lift and such.

Cleaned up and updated the Wiki. Thanks everyone.

I'm in a video game level design class and I decided do make portal maps. My teacher is not very familiar with hammer and I'm having a problem he hasn't been able to help me figure out so i was hoping you all could lend a hand. the problem is not with getting things to work in Hammer but rather finding things to continue to work on my map. when i look threw the list of Entities I can't find 80% of the portal stuff. i can find the turrets, cameras, portal gun, and the starting elevator but nothing else. Ex. boxes, buttons, doors, energy field generators, and those clear pains of glass. Infact when i go to Edit - Entity gallery, I still can't find them. After I told my teacher abut this he tried fining this stuff on his home PC and had the exact same results as I did.

So please excuse this if this is simply a simply a newbie problem bit I would really appreciate some help.

thanks

Josh W

jdw159 wrote:
I'm in a video game level design class and I decided do make portal maps. My teacher is not very familiar with hammer and I'm having a problem he hasn't been able to help me figure out so i was hoping you all could lend a hand. the problem is not with getting things to work in Hammer but rather finding things to continue to work on my map. when i look threw the list of Entities I can't find 80% of the portal stuff. i can find the turrets, cameras, portal gun, and the starting elevator but nothing else. Ex. boxes, buttons, doors, energy field generators, and those clear pains of glass. Infact when i go to Edit - Entity gallery, I still can't find them. After I told my teacher abut this he tried fining this stuff on his home PC and had the exact same results as I did.

So please excuse this if this is simply a simply a newbie problem bit I would really appreciate some help.

thanks

Josh W

Welcome to mapping. You actually need to make those things yourself.
Boxes are prop_physics and everything else is made up of multiple things. Please look through the Wiki as they are plenty of tutorials on creating the objects you are looking for.

hmmm i see. . . i will take a look thew the wiki and continue my work thank you Remmiz!

You should probably take a look at the sample map valve has supplied with portal. It's chamber 5, free to study and copy from in Hammer. It's fairly simple once you see how it all fits together.

You could also get the handy tool GCFScape, which allows you to open Portal's data, extract a map, and then use VMex to decompile it into Hammer. I recommend you only do this to study the internal workings of the map though.

Alternatively, you could download one of the many prefab packs on this site via the download database, but you wouldn't learn anything from that, now, would you?

Hope that helps.

Duffedwaffe wrote:
You should probably take a look at the sample map valve has supplied with portal. It's chamber 5, free to study and copy from in Hammer. It's fairly simple once you see how it all fits together.

You could also get the handy tool GCFScape, which allows you to open Portal's data, extract a map, and then use VMex to decompile it into Hammer. I recommend you only do this to study the internal workings of the map though.

Alternatively, you could download one of the many prefab packs on this site via the download database, but you wouldn't learn anything from that, now, would you?

Hope that helps.

wow i saw that file for chamber 5 but i didn't open it for some reason shakes head.

thanks for the heads up on the other info as well i will check that stuff tomorrow.

How do you make pistons move? I was able to create pistons in a map (vertical large pistons), but couldn't find info on how to make them move. The entity I created has no inputs. Any help would be appreciated. I'm new to hammer mapping.

Lars

larsh, use func_door

Mek wrote:
larsh, use func_door

Thanks!

I will start looking in that direction...
If this gets added to the FAQ, maybe there could also be a link to how to use func_door, e.g. http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Func_door, unless there's something more portal-specific.
Also, http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki ... h_Entities is helpful.

Thanks again... you gave me the key I needed.