I was just wondering, is it difficult to make a custom map for Portal? Does it take long, does it take a day or a month, what programs should I use, and yeah. I would like to know because I am wondering whether I should buy Portal for the PC because I would mostly want it for the console and custom map making.

All you need in order to make a map for Portal is Valve's Hammer Editor - which is completely free with the purchase of any source engine game.

As for difficulty and length of time, It really depends on a lot of factors:

Have you used 3d editors before?
How complex of a level are you making?
How long is the level you are making?
How polished is the level you are making?
Etc.

There are A LOT of tutorials and helpful people that can get you started with level making and if you are determined at all, you should be fine.

taco wrote:
All you need in order to make a map for Portal is Valve's Hammer Editor - which is completely free with the purchase of any source engine game.

As for difficulty and length of time, It really depends on a lot of factors:

Have you used 3d editors before?
How complex of a level are you making?
How long is the level you are making?
How polished is the level you are making?
Etc.

There are A LOT of tutorials and helpful people that can get you started with level making and if you are determined at all, you should be fine.

The Hammer Editor I will need to get from buying it off of Steam... and the questions:

1. Not really.
2. Not too hard, I just want to make really small test ones at first then lead on to big ones once (if) I get good.
3. Not long.
4. Not polished (yet).

I am just finishing up a set of 3 maps that I started in september. I took a few weeks off of working on them for sanity reasons, but otherwise I've been working on them weekends and evenings since september. Its mostly been bug fixing and detail work the last two months. I'm not inexperienced, but its taken me a long time to get the maps to near release. I get so distracted while working on them tho, especially the last month or so.

noodleboy347 wrote:

I was just wondering, is it difficult to make a custom map for Portal?

For a beginner, yes, it's something that's not given to everyone. I mean that you can't do a complete map under the Source Engine without reading a lot a things (tutorials or books) before. I wrote a few of them in my native language, and I must say that mastering the Source Engine is a real pain in the a**. Because, although these tools are somewhat easier to use than others, it's way more difficult to use them the right way (optimizing your maps is really tricky and requires a lot of experience).

noodleboy347 wrote:

Does it take long, does it take a day or a month

A day, no. Unless you're practising with the tools and the Engine for a while, it could take you a month, or more. Even for a small room. But when you start gaining experience, it goes faster and faster. I can make a fairly complex room like the last ones of Portal in a matter or days.

noodleboy347 wrote:
I am wondering whether I should buy Portal for the PC because I would mostly want it for the console and custom map making.

Console as in xbox or ps? Don't by a console version.
As far as I'm aware there is no custom content being ported over to any console version of portal or TF2. Which sucks.
Mapping takes a while, fortunatly for you, portal is one of the simplest games to map for, seeing as its style is so clean and visial cutter free.
Its pretty simple to get to grips with hammer and the entities needed for basic portal gameplay (with the exception of ball catcher/launchers) so you should be ready to go shortly after getting hammer installed.
A mapper like myself could churn a decent map out in about 3-4 weeks with pressure applied. A really really seasoned mapper could probably take a week off that and still have a reasonably good map, whilst a novice will probably spend that long and not produce a very good map. However, this being portal its good for novices because its so simple.

My "Thinking Outside The Cube" map was my first attempt at Hammer and this whole mapping thing. It took me 2 fairly busy months to fully come to grips with all the aspects possible in Hammer to:

• learn Hammer basics
• learn how to create/modify ball catchers, killer goo, box makers, pushbuttons, elevators, etc (prefabs help some, but not as much as you think)
• plan and map 12-13 semi-interesting puzzles
• add the various subtle things that map a map polished (autosave games, closing credits, descriptive overlays, adding cubemaps, decent lighting, etc)
• created some custom GLADOS voices
• created some custom overlays (signs, etc)
• perhaps learn some obscure aspect of mapping that you want that few people do and there are few/no tutorials for (in my case it was frictionless surfaces)
• fixing leaks, adding areaportals, various performance improvements
• playtesting

Now that I've done it though. . . I feel that I have a good basis for making almost anything portal-related. What I dont know now, I think I can quickly learn. . .(fingers crossed)

A quickie map can be thrown out in a fairly short time, but a QUALITY map otherswill enjoy takes time. If you want to whip out a map in a week or two and its your first time. . . SEVERELY limit your desires for that map, because your first job is to learn mapping itself. There are LOTs of good tutorials out there for most aspects. . .

Hammer has a very difficult learning curve, but once you know all the shortcuts it gets really easy. One thing you might want to do is download VMex, decompile the official maps, and just study them to see how Valve does things. You can learn a lot from it.

Um... alright, I'd like to learn, so I'll do it. What are prefabs? Sorry to sound like a n00b.

noodleboy347 wrote:
Um... alright, I'd like to learn, so I'll do it. What are prefabs? Sorry to sound like a n00b.

No prob; we all sound that way at one time or another.

"Prefabs" are pre-built objects that you can simply place in your map, that have most of the work done for you. While that big pushbutton may SEEM easy to operate, there is an amazing number of triggers/components involved in actually making it work as you see it in-game. (and its not the worst component by far. . . ) Prefabs are a way to get you 90% of the way towards creating/hooking that pushbutton up without having to rebuild it from scratch.

Here is a good example:

dload.php?action=file&file_id=139

I personnally learned enough to do my first basic chamber in about a week. You can find this map there : aperture-secondary-labs-room-1-t739.html

It gives you a good idea of what can be done in that much time.

But you have to note that that I used CP4P (common prefabs for portal), which contains premade elements such as buttons.
But I advise you to try to create at least one of these elements first yourself to get familiar with the input/output concept.

Also I made some 3D theory at computer school, which help a lot to understand some concepts quicker (especially the texture application made sense almost instantly to me, but all those numbers can be confusing if you don't know anything about 3D.)

So it took me a little more than a week, but I wasn't a complete newbie with 3D (even if I almost never did any modelling, only theory to render textured cubes in an engine :p)

I think that if you are quite good in math and motivated enough to spend most of your free time reading documentation, it is possible to learn enough to do an already pretty cool map in about 2 weeks, by starting with no knowledge about it.

Following the good advices of veterans from this forum is definitely a good idea, too. They are very helpful and can give the solutions to your problems very quickly if you ask nicely.