Extreme Portal Funneling

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lord_blex
96 Posts
#96068
Posted Jun 25, 2013
I have a test, where you have to use tricky-ish portal placement to fling yourself. The problem is that it takes a lot of trial and error until you can get it working and I want the puzzle to be about figuring the stuff out, not moving portals 2 units up/down a 100 times..
Limiting the portalable surface doesn't really work here. So is there a way to increase the "strength" of portal funneling? That should do the trick.
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Dafflewoctor
415 Posts
#96070
Posted Jun 25, 2013
Replied 1 hour later
I would think that you're looking for the info_placement_helper entity, it's used for aligning portals so that when the player shoots within a certain radius, it automatically places the portal in a specified place at a specified angle. [sorry if I completely misunderstood the problem.]
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lord_blex
96 Posts
#96071
Posted Jun 25, 2013
Replied 1 hour later
That wouldn't be bad, if it worked only on one axis. I don't want to limit horizontal placement at all. (We are talking about a big white wall.) But it doesn't work that way, does it?
And depending on the speed of the player, the optimal hight of the portal could change as well, so this wouldn't be perfect..
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reepblue
894 Posts
#96075
Posted Jun 26, 2013
Replied 3 hours later
If it's flinging you are talking about, you can always rig the fling like Valve does with a trigger_catapult.
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iWork925
1,080 Posts
#96078
Posted Jun 26, 2013
Replied 2 hours later

lord_blex wrote:
And depending on the speed of the player, the optimal hight of the portal could change as well

You appear to understand how a portal affects forward momentum, or to be more precise, how it does not.

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lord_blex
96 Posts
#96095
Posted Jun 26, 2013
Replied 6 hours later

reepblue wrote:
If it's flinging you are talking about, you can always rig the fling like Valve does with a trigger_catapult.

I never used that before, but I guess it's time to learn how it works.

iWork925 wrote:
lord_blex wrote:

And depending on the speed of the player, the optimal hight of the portal could change as well

You appear to understand how a portal affects forward momentum, or to be more precise, how it does not.

Awwww, thank you

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FelixGriffin
2,680 Posts
#96098
Posted Jun 26, 2013
Replied 1 hour later
The options you'll want for this are Use Threshold Check = True and Player Velocity = (however fast they should go to fling). Then when the player is close to the right speed the game will correct it to exactly Player Velocity.
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lord_blex
96 Posts
#96101
Posted Jun 26, 2013
Replied 30 minutes later
What's the lower/upper threshold?
And how can I check the current player speed?
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El Farmerino
393 Posts
#96103
Posted Jun 26, 2013
Replied 33 minutes later
Use Lower and Upper Threshold to set a speed range - if the player's speed is within this range, it will be corrected to the speed set in Player Velocity.
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lord_blex
96 Posts
#96104
Posted Jun 26, 2013
Replied 22 minutes later
Yeah, that was my guess (even though the wiki doesn't actually say it's speed). But what do the values mean?
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FelixGriffin
2,680 Posts
#96113
Posted Jun 26, 2013
Replied 2 hours later
I think they're multiplied by the intented velocity to give the limits, so that the speed could be fine-tuned without constantly changing the thresholds.
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El Farmerino
393 Posts
#96114
Posted Jun 26, 2013
Replied 10 minutes later
Yeah - here is my understanding, by way of an example:

Player Velocity = 1000
Lower Threshold = 0.1
Upper Threshold = 0.2

Lower Threshold
0.1 x 1000 = 100 - this is the allowed deviation below the intended velocity.

Upper Threshold
0.2 x 1000 = 200 - this is the allowed deviation above the intended velocity.

Therefore, if the Player's speed is between 900 and 1200, the trigger will activate and correct their speed to 1000; nothing will happen if player speed is outside of this range.

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lord_blex
96 Posts
#96118
Posted Jun 26, 2013
Replied 1 hour later
Thank you. Do you know the answer to my other question? (displaying the player speed) I think I saw that being done before, but I can't find the console command..
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FelixGriffin
2,680 Posts
#96123
Posted Jun 26, 2013
Replied 1 hour later
I have no idea, sorry. I suppose you could turn on dev mode and bind a key to ent_fire !player RunScriptCode "printl('PLAYER SPEED: '+sqrt(self.GetVelocity().xself.GetVelocity().x + self.GetVelocity().yself.GetVelocity().y + self.GetVelocity().z*self.GetVelocity().z);" if you wanted, but I'm sure there's a better method.
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lord_blex
96 Posts
#96308
Posted Jun 30, 2013
Replied 3 days later
found it :biggrin:
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TeamSpen210
608 Posts
#96433
Posted Jul 03, 2013
Replied 3 days later
I've actually noticed that if a catapult fails to catapult a player, it'll spit out into the dev console something like "Player speed is <speed>, needs to be <min> - <max>". If it suceeds, it'll say something like "Player speed is <speed>, correcting to <speeed>". It will also say something like "Need more speed" if you haven't given it enough speed to sucessfully pull off a fling.
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srs bsnss
552 Posts
#96497
Posted Jul 06, 2013
Replied 2 days later

El Farmerino wrote:
Yeah - here is my understanding, by way of an example:

Player Velocity = 1000
Lower Threshold = 0.1
Upper Threshold = 0.2

Lower Threshold
0.1 x 1000 = 100 - this is the allowed deviation below the intended velocity.

Upper Threshold
0.2 x 1000 = 200 - this is the allowed deviation above the intended velocity.

Therefore, if the Player's speed is between 900 and 1200, the trigger will activate and correct their speed to 1000; nothing will happen if player speed is outside of this range.

This is correct, but for general clarity and summarisation, the values are decimal percentages of the player velocity. As such:
0.1 = 10%
0.2 = 20%
and so on.

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