Has anyone had any experience with making modified versions of the official Portal textures?

Particularly what I'm looking to do is make a modified version of indicator lights and other textures to add a third "Unpowered" state.

The idea is for a map that has areas that can lose or gain power. For example, switches in an unpowered area would not play sounds or activate anything, doors would not open/close, etc, lighting would be dim (maybe red "emergency lights"). To progress through the area, you'd have to continue through after restoring power.

Other aspects might include restoring power to an area, putting a cube on a switch to open a door, and then cutting power so the door doesn't close when the cube is removed.

Obviously glowy indicator lights (and even some of the skinning on the base of the Superbutton) are out of place in an unpowered area.

I did that kind of thing on my Logic Portals textures.

My logic indicators have three states:
0 : False
1 : True
2 : Blank

The Blank state was supposed to be activated before buildings cubemaps so you can't see reflections on objects glowing orange when the actual state colour is green.

What you need to do is to learn how to do multi-frames textures. Then you switch through the frames with a env_toggletexture, input the chosen state.

It's not hard, but it takes time, as I couldn't see another way to do this without using the official texture compiler, I mean, the Photoshop plug-in that gives you fresh textures doesn't seem to handle multi frames, if I'm not wrong.

Hurricaaane wrote:
It's not hard, but it takes time, as I couldn't see another way to do this without using the official texture compiler, I mean, the Photoshop plug-in that gives you fresh textures doesn't seem to handle multi frames, if I'm not wrong.

I don't think you are wrong. Haven't found out how to do multi frame textures with the photoshop plugin either.

I found a program called VTFEdit that seems well-suited to this. I'll have to see how it works.

Are the indicator lights used on logic_portals available for 'public consumption' anywhere?

Dewin wrote:
Are the indicator lights used on logic_portals available for 'public consumption' anywhere?

I don't think you would be happy to use them, their design are completely different from the regular indicator lights and other checkmarks...

VTFedit > that piece of shit photoshop plugin.

The way you would create multi-framed textures similar to the indicator lights is setup the texture like an animated texture. Be sure to number the frames numerically (001, 002, 003 and so on) or it will not work! Then what you would do is Import a new texture, and select ALL of the textures you want imported into your "animated" texture.

The difference between an animated texture and a toggle texture is all about the VMT, so you probably can just copy one of the existing indicator strip VMTs and use it as a reference.

is VTFedit just a program for compiling vtfs? you don't acutally do editing in it do you? Edit in photoshop then ship them over to vtf edit to make them a vtf?
just to clear this up for me.

I don't use VTFedit but I belive it's some kind of a user-friendly interface of the regular texture compiler.

So it's probably not something you can "draw" on...

Correct, it is a GUI for the tga2vtf tool. You will have to first create your images in photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, GIMP, or whatever image program you use.