Inspired by Reepblue's old Hammer Notepad series, and having finally found a screen recorder that works, I'm going to try to build a new test element every day for a few days and post videos of the results here.

This first one is from Monday: Stasis Gel and Stasis Guns! Enjoy.

youtube.com/watch?v=EFZ3aMeCzUE

Tired of the traditional mobility gels? Felix Griffin presents...Immobility Gel!

The effects were inspired by the Slaver stasis fields in Larry Niven's books. This gel simply puts a stasis field around anything it hits. Cubes, being solid, can actually be affixed in place in midair, while turrets simply jam up.

The viewmodel is the SSMOD Flamethrower, the particles are my own. Note how the gel is very good at determining what surface to stick to, except in the "corner case": if you shoot it at a concave corner, it forms a strange spherical shell instead. It's not a bug, it's a feature. : )

All these cubes are unmodified prop_weighted_cubes, and the turrets are npc_portal_turret_floors; there's no special coding on them. It's all in the gel. With one instance this object can be dropped into your own maps...as soon as I find a good way to package it.

I love hammer notepads. (Is the video still uploading?)

At the moment it says it has about five minutes to go, so by the time you see this it should be up.

very cool stuff... I like how large the goo looks

Thanks!

Since I now have a working video recorder, I'll upload a video of the Gel from Scratch map. I'm a bit ashamed of it now, but I don't want to change the original.

youtube.com/watch?v=tWlEyD3cNFg

Does the ice gel melt when washed with water or cleansing gel? (Probably Bose Einstein condensates of asbestos somehow turned into a fluid or whatever because that's not possible).

I'm still working on that one...cleansing gel freezes when it touches it, so it's sort of the reverse of normal. You need to drop some other gel on it first.

FelixGriffin wrote:
Thanks!

Since I now have a working video recorder, I'll upload a video of the Gel from Scratch map. I'm a bit ashamed of it now, but I don't want to change the original.

youtube.com/watch?v=tWlEyD3cNFg

cool stuff
I also like the Back-Stock Portalgun with hand

Is that all of your gels or do you have more? Also, did you make the particles because you wanted to or because you had to use them instead of the normal ones?

BenVlodgi wrote:
FelixGriffin wrote:

Thanks!

Since I now have a working video recorder, I'll upload a video of the Gel from Scratch map. I'm a bit ashamed of it now, but I don't want to change the original.

youtube.com/watch?v=tWlEyD3cNFg

cool stuff
I also like the Back-Stock Portalgun with hand

I thought that when I saw this too

My favorite was the green gel for some reason. That's really cool you could do that!

Begins coming up with puzzle ideas that could involve these gels

I had to create new particles for the gel on the ground, but you can see I mostly reused the actual splattering effects from the original gels. One unfortunate side effect of this method is that it's incompatible with normal gels (or rather, it's too compatible: you get both the custom gel and the standard gel affecting the player at once), so I'm working on that as well.

These are the only gels I've created at this point, although I have a few ideas for more. It would be very easy, for example, to make a gel that cancelled gravity on any surface it touched, or even one that went a bit further. Make a trail of this stuff up a wall and you can climb to the ceiling!

Here's yesterday's Hammer Notepad entry: those time-slow switches from Super Mario Galaxy 2.

youtube.com/watch?v=4TbZh28q_b0

The effect itself is pretty simple: lowering the phys_timescale to 0.5 and turning on a color-correction filter (because Portal 2 broke the much simpler mat_yuv command).

The part I'm most proud of is the music swapping. Whenever the tracks swap, they stay exactly in sync (the normal one isn't continuing to play under the slow-time one, it's just a bit quieter). There's a soundscript operator stack for this, to sync the laser-receiver chords, but I don't think it's ever used to interchange two separate sounds in the original game. As such, it requires a bit of finicky Hammer logic to start them in sync. I have to enable the normal one, then enable slow-time, then disable normal, then enable normal, then disable slow-time at the start of the map. That's what adds the odd delay in the sound when the level loads.

When I added that delay I now see that I messed up some of the other commands I used to set up the effect, which is why sv_cheats 1 shows on the screen before hud_saytext_time 0 shuts that off. Sorry about that.

That time-slowing mechanic would make for interesting puzzles I've found that it gets really interesting if you have a player_speedmod set to 2 as well as the phys_timescale set to 0.5, so the player moves at normal speed and everything else is slow.

That's not even necessary, phys_timescale doesn't affect the player.

I'm uploading the version with the audio at the same time as today's notepad: Gravity Gel! It's not Adhesion Gel, but it lets you climb walls and it's as close as I've gotten.

youtube.com/watch?v=7uOVb7g143Q

These purple gel blobs collapse into swirly energy markers on impact, which emit a gravity-cancelling spherical field!

I would have preferred to keep the blobby particle, but it's VERY expensive to render. The energy thing is much cheaper, so it's what stays on the screen permanently.

Out of the gels I've built, this is the easiest to implement into a custom map. It should (note the "should") even be compatible with other gravity-generating effects, such as a PUNT cube! And as you can see, water washes it off instantly.

Just make sure people believe you that you didn't use noclip... (Issue with one of omnicoder's videos).

I figured the Companion Cube would take care of that, but I'll make another doing what Omni did.

yishbarr wrote:
Just make sure people believe you that you didn't use noclip... (Issue with one of omnicoder's videos).

or people could just realize that omni and felix are good at modding and can create these items. o_O
IMO cheats are super easy to spot, but that's just because I've dealt with this engine a long time

New videos! I love having a screen recorder!

The one from today is still uploading, but here are some old ones.

Another recording of the antigrav gel, showing that sv_cheats is 0 and noclip is off.
youtube.com/watch?v=v5rh8d04hwc

Security Turrets from Bastion, although I wish I had a better model for them.
youtube.com/watch?v=v8Xdnvg6FP4

Various objects from Braid. I showed this before, but the audio was horrible.
youtube.com/watch?v=ikl83twH61k

Today, some progress on the Ice-Nine. When water splashes near it it freezes with a cool effect, but for some reason VALVe removed both methods I know of to change the player's friction from Portal 2. So for now you just go four times as fast.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85lMoVuEJcI

Today I got the Blapperture Multitool working...or at least part of it.

This first phase combines a Gluon Gun, a Tau Cannon, and a Zero-Point Energy Field Manipulator. The lab boys over at Black Mesa built all of these, but apparently never considered duct-taping them all together. Honestly, they call themselves "scientists"...

Due to a glitch in my screencast software that I didn't see until now, this video is in two parts. The first whows the primary-fire (the Gluon Gun), although as you can see it still has a few flaws (it only vaporizes things at the end of the beam, not in the middle).

youtube.com/watch?v=pMWmk7yIUWw

The secondary-fire is a Gravity Gun primary-fire that charges up like a Tau Cannon/Gauss Gun secondary-fire. This lets you control how much force you launch the object with. Just be careful not to overcharge it.

youtube.com/watch?v=mMGXH1LPbPw

This is all built in Hammer, without any scripts. There was going to be a script, but it broke. So now it's pure Hammer. Science from scratch!

The other parts of the multitool are a standard Portal Gun and an Aperture Gluon Gun, which I called a Stasis Gun in my previous video. It's literally a "gluon" gun--you pull the trigger and it puts "glue on" stuff.

Are you using the func_tank method with +use on map startup?