All right, so I've been toying with Hammer, and a couple of questions popped into my mind, questions which (FWICT) have not yet been answered elsewhere.

1) Is there any way to target the player's current weapon via the I/O system? What I want to make is a fizzler that downgrades the portal gun from "blue and orange" to "just blue". I tried targeting the weapon_portalgun by name, but that only works for guns that haven't been picked up. And I tried using a trigger_weapon_strip to replace the gun, but that runs the weapon pickup animation, which I don't want. So...?

2) Right now, there doesn't seem to be any way for me to use the subtitle buffer in a custom map. FacePoser doesn't yet work with The Orange Box, and captioncompiler.exe hits me with an error every time I try to use it. Is there any other way to display custom captions? (And yes, I know about game_text. I'm asking for something that can be interspersed with the turret captions.)

Those are noob questions? Holy crap, then I must be an uber-noob!

Try using a trigger_once and a weapon strip entity (check the boards, there's another thread on how to use it) and/or a point_clientcommand to either give the player a 1-stage Portal gun, or forego the weapon strip and simply downgrade the Portal gun via console commands. I'm not 100% sure what those commands are, so maybe someone else can help there.

As for your custom captions, yeah, you're pretty much fucked since those tools haven't been updated properly for Orange Box. You'll either have to wait, or just use a game_text.

Well, I didn't find any console commands that can undo an "upgrade_portalgun," so that sucks. And I tried using a player_weaponstrip, but that has the same problem as the trigger_weapon_strip. See, I'd like the downgrade to happen during the fizzle animation, while the gun is shaking and glowing, rather than for it to happen by picking up a new gun. Of course, if that's not possible, I guess I'll have to live with that. Maybe I can set up the fizzler to just destroy the gun outright.

Also, on the topic of the console, two more questions:

3) What's the difference between point_servercommand and point_clientcommand in a single-player game?
4) If I use one of those entities to fire a command that would count as a cheat, do I still need to fire "sv_cheats 1" first?

A server command is where it deals with the actual server such as the max ammo or round limit.

A client command is where it deals with the clients stats such as movement speed or gravity for that player.

Try stripping the weapon completely off the player then make another one there so it gives the weapon back to the player, making the illusion that it was downgraded.

Mapster wrote:
Try stripping the weapon completely off the player then make another one there so it gives the weapon back to the player, making the illusion that it was downgraded.

Hunter wrote:
And I tried using a trigger_weapon_strip to replace the gun, but that runs the weapon pickup animation, which I don't want.