If/when Portal source code is released so the portal gun can be modified and hacked into multiplayer, would a mod that places players in CTF environment with different (per)versions of Portalgun instead of normal firearms be interesting?

Also, see poll in this thread

Would make the teleporter useless and I see some nasty sentry gun uses. Like a portal hidden in a ceiling in an important passage and the other portal in front of the sentry. I don't think it fits, although I think there are nice things that can be done with the portal gun in an online game.

Don't you think it would destroy any defense strategy, since you just could portal near or even directly to the flag and control points?

There are no way to remove portals, so any portal put inside the enemy's defense would remain there forever and could be used for the rest of the game to bypass all defenders and just keep winning.

Seems hardly fair.

yes, but if you do put a portal in the other team's base then the other team has easy access to your base... but how will we kill people to stop them? turrets that can be set up again?

You seem to have some good ideas and seems to be putting in a lot of effort determining things for this

It'd probably be very hard to make it all work out having tons of portals and not knowing which goes where

If you can find a good way to pull this off, awesome job

Some one made a hl2 mod based on portal (before it was releasd by designed from portal) called Exite, which had SP and MP. MP didnt work too well, was laggy but I'm not sure if that was code or not. It was pretty fun though.

To me, the only viable way for this to work would be to add a class that only gets the Portal gun and a melee weapon, and only one in six or one in eight people on a team could be this class. Maybe even just make it one per team.

That said, the two-way nature of the portals do act as something of a balancing mechanic. Aside from that, it would take some exquisitely skilled map design and a rapid-revision method to prevent and rapidly fix any exploits that players find.

That said, TF2 with a Chell class sounds like it could be cool.

But you already got a Chell-class in Team Fortress 2! Nobody ever told you?

Extremely usefull, instant transportation over great distances.

Unfortunately one-way, and has to recharge after every time used.

I'm talking about the Engineer and his Teleporters.

I still think that the best idea for a Portal multiplayer game would be kind of like Holy Wars (an old old "king of the hill" or "smear the queer" style game). There would be 1 Portal Gun in the map, and people would race to get it. Once you got it, you could not use other weapons and you got points the longer you held the Portal Gun. The object is to kill the person with it, and once they die and drop it, you need to hold on to it for as long as you can.

msleeper wrote:
I still think that the best idea for a Portal multiplayer game would be kind of like Holy Wars (an old old "king of the hill" or "smear the queer" style game). There would be 1 Portal Gun in the map, and people would race to get it. Once you got it, you could not use other weapons and you got points the longer you held the Portal Gun. The object is to kill the person with it, and once they die and drop it, you need to hold on to it for as long as you can.

That's a rather interesting idea. I agree it's probably the most feasible multi-player that could be achieved in Portal without chaos and confusion ensuing

The whole issue of "how will players know which portals are theirs and which portals belong to other players is pretty simple. I imagine that the actual rendering of the portal is done clientside, so it should be very easy to make the edges of portals belonging to other players grayscaled or white or some other color besides orange and blue.

I don't know if its remotely possible, but if some of these MP game types get created there should be a special item each player or some players have that destroy other people's portals. It needs to be balanced though in some way.

Adair wrote:
I don't know if its remotely possible, but if some of these MP game types get created there should be a special item each player or some players have that destroy other people's portals. It needs to be balanced though in some way.

Destroying something is only strategically valuable if it is costly to replace. Break an Engineer's sentry gun and he has to spend precious time rebuilding it. Destroy a portal, and the user just shoots another one.

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There are no way to remove portals, so any portal put inside the enemy's defense would remain there forever and could be used for the rest of the game to bypass all defenders and just keep winning.

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I don't know if its remotely possible, but if some of these MP game types get created there should be a special item each player or some players have that destroy other people's portals. It needs to be balanced though in some way.

That concern was taken care of when I first started to work on this concept.

There will be 2 (or, now as I consider it, maybe 3) classes who have ways to spoil portals, however, only one of them will be able to do that from a distance.
Also, only one will actually destroy the portal, others will spoil it in a weird way.

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Destroying something is only strategically valuable if it is costly to replace. Break an Engineer's sentry gun and he has to spend precious time rebuilding it. Destroy a portal, and the user just shoots another one.

Actually, destroying hostile portals makes tactical sense during base assault, because portals are easiest way for enemy to extract objective. Off course, the adversary can shoot another one, but he will have to do so while dodging your attempts to portal him into a "fiery maw of DOOM (TM)". Also, finding (and destroying) a suspicious looking portal-pair in the map might impede the adversary's long term plans (someone from opposing team will have to come back by foot and reestablish the portal).

This is also a way to make portal-hotspot griefing less severe.

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The whole issue of "how will players know which portals are theirs and which portals belong to other players is pretty simple. I imagine that the actual rendering of the portal is done clientside, so it should be very easy to make the edges of portals belonging to other players grayscaled or white or some other color besides orange and blue.

Yes. Even more, this should be a game option, so the players will to go for an easy game can choose "show hostile portals in different color" and "show my portal in different color. More hardcore could choose "show my portal in different color" or even "no portal differentiation aid" for ultimate lulz.

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You seem to have some good ideas and seems to be putting in a lot of effort determining things for this

It'd probably be very hard to make it all work out having tons of portals and not knowing which goes where

If you can find a good way to pull this off, awesome job

Hehe, during exceptionaly boring meetings I am killing time by writing an "almost-formal" design doc for this baby. Working title is "Portal Arena project" BTW.

Oh, and it is vastly unlikely for "ton of portals" to occur here. At least not in one same room, for the reason that player will have to use them quite often and in different places to efficiently navigate maps.

P.S.: Perhaps I forgot to make stuff clear - this is not a case for CTF 2 + portalgun mod.

All classes are brand new, remade from scratch (ahem, some "normal CTF inspirations would be obvious, OC, but they will be not-so-very obvious).

There are a lot of differences (and a lot of playtesting will be required).

for instance, only one class can carry the Objective (BTW, guess what will work instead of Flag), and this class has a gravgun instead of portalgun and so cannot set up portals for himself. However, he can go seriously offensive with his gravgun (it will be somewhat more powerfull than Gordon's, packing more "punch" in its jolt), after all, Objective is heavy.

Also, no more engineers. However, sentries will still be available: every map will have stashes of autonomously aggressive agents (beloved Portal turrets and more). Those agents will be hostile to all teams and rather tough. some fine trickery will be required to make those bastards defend your base.
However, the team that manages it is considered a HUGE SUCCESS.

I will post all classes and primary abilities when I find time to translate that part of my desdoc from Russian (thats tough)

msleeper wrote:
I still think that the best idea for a Portal multiplayer game would be kind of like Holy Wars (an old old "king of the hill" or "smear the queer" style game). There would be 1 Portal Gun in the map, and people would race to get it.

It would be cool if there were 2 modes for this kind of gameplay. The traditional one where you have control of both colored portals and you can do whatever you want with them...and an alternative one where you have control of only one portal...with the other end dropping into a meat grinder...the objective being to try and get people to fall in to the portal and get ground up. Anyone dying that way gives you a point. shrugs Maybe not.

hamsteralliance wrote:
It would be cool if there were 2 modes for this kind of gameplay. ... an alternative one where you have control of only one portal...with the other end dropping into a meat grinder...the objective being to try and get people to fall in to the portal and get ground up. Anyone dying that way gives you a point. shrugs Maybe not.

Simply have a gratuitous meat grinder off in a corner of the map. If you want to be able to drop people into it, just run over there and drop a portal there and then go nuts. No need for a special game mode.

How about if your portals can only remain open for a couple of seconds (say 20 seconds), and they immediately close when you die?

I think if you die, the portal gun drops, and anyone that picks it up then sees your portals.

This might be interesting if there were a smaller number of portal guns, otherwise no one would pick it up. (Except engineers ... if they were in the game).

I'm actually trying to put together some cooperative multiplayer maps. It's for a movie I'm writing about a "Corporate Retreat" that goes horribly wrong ...

My first cut will be a few extra buttons on the standard maps, so that you can't just bypass box dropping by having a friend stand on the button.

  == John ==

read post on steam forums i made (i'm k2pek2 there)
: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/s ... p?t=647658
also, i just had another idea, it would be really cool if you could add like some behind the scenes action somehow in your map, you know like when you escape? and you could have that only reachable from like breaking glass with a rocket, only it has to be difficult to perform because its kinda an easter egg/huge advantage. perhaps you could do rooms like that with like extra turrets like i mentioned in the steam forums.

Easter Eggs in maps would indeed be nice...

But I think your post is rather off-topic here, we're talking about Portal Capture-The-Flag.