I've been making a map pack that uses both the gravity gun and the portal gun for fun effect. But I need some testers for the second level. Try it out, and feel free to comment

The map is at http://forums.thinking.withportals.com/dload.php?action=file&file_id=112.
[FINISHED VERSION]

You start out with the portal gun and gravity gun, press 'G' to switch between them.
You can get stuck under the stairs. Try not to.

Please, if you get stuck, tell me. Unlike Valve's levels, this one isn't very tolerant to mistakes.

Hello, and welcome to the thinking with portals forum

As always, i'm happy to see new mappers post and show off their work.

I just downloaded and gave the map a run through.
The first time I played, my first impressions were that the map was very visually appealing. And at first I didn't actually realise I had the gravity gun as well as the portal gun.(I should have read your post more carefully)
As soon as I saw that, it kind of killed it for me. The gravity gun belongs in Half life. Not in portal.

I managed to get as far as the angled platform fling, with the button that opens the door. Unfortunatly, your buttons aren't able to be pressed by cubes. Which is another turn off for me.

I managed to prop the cube against the door, so that I could push the button, and the cube would hold it open. It worked, but as soon as I got there, the door slammed shut, and put the cube into the room I could no longer access.

And thats when I gave up. If it weren't for the buttons that couldn't be pressed by cubes, then i'd be a lot more inclined to like the map. However, that problem combined with the gravity gun simply being there (when as far as I can tell, it's not actually required), makes the map unplayable for me.

Also, you might want to upload the map to the TWP database. Then one of the mods will move it to the work in progress forum.

I just played your map, and I must say, I quite liked it, despite the bugs I found. The first corridor set a nice mood with the blood and everything.

As for the inclusion of the gravity gun, I have no problem with it, but there wasn't much use for it in this level (I only needed it for one thing).

Anyway, here is what I think you need to work on:

**Turret room.**
The base of the tube you drop down has a misaligned brush on one side.
The broken door is set to touch activates, and also has carving problems/artifacts at the bottom.
Textures don't match up to edges of walls/ceiling properly.
The energy fields protecting turrets not visible until you get close to them.
You need a better effect to show that button/door is broken (sparks from the button etc).
The lighting is very bland in this room, and would benefit greatly from the kind of light strips that are used around the edges of the test chambers in the actual game.

**Water room.**
You need to use a func_portal_bumper on the wall where the metal meets the concrete.
The wall has a rather noticable break half way up the concrete, where the slimy concrete meets the clean looking concrete.
The metal texture needs to be broken up with lights and varying surfaces like in the metal chambers in the game.
The cube can be somewhat awkward to get on the button.
The door is not carved out properly at the edges, and also has a gap which can be seen through at one side.

**Last room.**
The glass needs the nodraw texture on the non-visible edges, as it interferes with the floor texture, and makes a flickering zig-zag effect.
The same effect can also be seen on the columns that make the steps rise, due to 2 brushes occupying the same space. Make the bottom part of each column wider to prevent this.
Lighting suffers the same problem as the earlier rooms as not being very aperture-ish. Edge lighting would work well here.
The ceiling is too low when going up the steps at the end

Also, on my first playthrough, I got myself trapped it the last room, unable to press the button, as i didn't break the glass with the turret. I fired a portal through the grated ceiling, went back for the cube, made a second portal and went through with the cube. After messing around in here I realised I could not get back out, and had no means of breaking the glass from inside to put the cube on the button.

I have commented on a lot of things here, but each one is small in itself, and easily fixable. I think this map has potential, with or without the gravity gun.

Speaking of which, does it have any intended use on this level, other than getting the cube back more easily?

Anyway, nice work. Good luck with this map.

i cant switch between the guns... dunno if its just me? =/

username wrote:
If you do load a saved game, there are two crates in the tube. Does anyone know a workaround?

I think that load-spawning comes from a logic_auto (which spawns cubes at the start of the map, but also at loading, I think?) try "yes" on "only once" at it's outputs?

Haven't tried the map yet, but I have also thought of including the gravity-gun in portal, as actually pulling and throwing the cubes instead of just carrying them would create a new kind of puzzles^^

Lorithad wrote:
Hello, and welcome to the thinking with portals forum

As always, i'm happy to see new mappers post and show off their work.

I just downloaded and gave the map a run through.
The first time I played, my first impressions were that the map was very visually appealing. And at first I didn't actually realise I had the gravity gun as well as the portal gun.(I should have read your post more carefully)
As soon as I saw that, it kind of killed it for me. The gravity gun belongs in Half life. Not in portal.

I managed to get as far as the angled platform fling, with the button that opens the door. Unfortunatly, your buttons aren't able to be pressed by cubes. Which is another turn off for me.

I managed to prop the cube against the door, so that I could push the button, and the cube would hold it open. It worked, but as soon as I got there, the door slammed shut, and put the cube into the room I could no longer access.

And thats when I gave up. If it weren't for the buttons that couldn't be pressed by cubes, then i'd be a lot more inclined to like the map. However, that problem combined with the gravity gun simply being there (when as far as I can tell, it's not actually required), makes the map unplayable for me.

Also, you might want to upload the map to the TWP database. Then one of the mods will move it to the work in progress forum.

I didn't explain this, but this is actually the second map in the map pack. The first is named "alpha_testing". It actually uses the gravity gun more, as that is where you obtain it. The hard part of getting the player to use the gravity gun is that it's fairly imprecise. This is also a few days old, so It's been changed significantly. I'll add the updated version soon.

Well that makes it a little better then. If there's a prequal to this map that explains why you have it, that makes it a little less evil.

Is it too cheesy for you to obtain the gravity gun by going through a portal that transcends time, flinging you into the future?

Well, thus far there has been no mention of time travel within the portal, or half life series. So...Yeah.

Personally I'm hoping for some sort of laberatory where it's sitting on a table. Or perhaps in the hand of a slain Gordon Freeman.

Though we don't really know what era the portal series takes place in. We know that GLaDOS has taken over, so the human race could be extinct, or they're on vacation. We just don't know.

Well, let me give the story, and tell me if it's any good.
(I believe portal takes place before the events in half-life 2, and so I assumed the gravity gun didn't exist yet, and it would have to come from the future.)
Near the beginning of the first level, you find yourself standing inside a small room with a window into a test chamber holding the portal gun. You press a button, and the stereotypical overload sequence happens, causing the portal gun to fire a supercharged portal. You see through the portal that it exits into city 17. As you watch, the citadel explodes and the shockwave races out towards you, whiting out the room. When your vision returns, the room is scorched, wreckage is scattered throughout the room, and the gravity gun is lying on the ground. From there, you hop through the now shattered window, grab the weapons, and try to escape the ruined facility.

Lorithad wrote:
Well, thus far there has been no mention of time travel within the portal, or half life series. So...Yeah.

Personally I'm hoping for some sort of laberatory where it's sitting on a table. Or perhaps in the hand of a slain Gordon Freeman.

Though we don't really know what era the portal series takes place in. We know that GLaDOS has taken over, so the human race could be extinct, or they're on vacation. We just don't know.

FALSE!!! In HL2 when you leave nova prospect you get teleported a week into the future! Through a "slow teleport" so yes you can time travel etc.

I like the map idea, though it brings up something that ive been waiting on...maps outside the facility...using real world locations similar to the behind the scenes maps only say ... outside? The only issue is that it will be a lot harder to make and take a lot more time and testing but I really think the mapper that does do it will be moving the custom portal mapping into a great new direction.

Also from what i've read on the timelines of portal and hl2 it sounds like they are dead on, reading some valve interviews they said chell will be in episode 3, so we shall see!

Astro, you get a gold star:

One thing though...I'm not convinced of time travel with the slow teleport.
Forward time travel is pretty easy. Take stasis for example. To an outside observer, time is passing normally. However to the person in stasis, it would be as if they were magically transported through time.

The point of all this mombo jumbo however, is that two way time travel has never been established in the half life universe. A super charged portal would likely not allow for time travel.

But whatever. If you want to include it in your story for the map, my objection shouldn't stop you.

This is purely speculative, but what if you put a portal on a block and slow teleport the block?

Well, all of this is speculative. That's half the fun of it.
Putting a portal on a block, or wall or whatever, then slow teleporting it would result in the portal traveling to the future on one side. However, then we're going to have to speculate about things like maximum portal duration.

The way a slow teleport works, is the object in question is removed from our physical universe entirely (yes, I know there could be electrical energy present somewhere, but as far as a physical object, it's gone.)
So as soon as the block with the portal (hereby known as Portal A) is teleported, the remaining portal (hereby known as Portal B) would disengage. From it's prespective, Portal A was destroyed in some freak accident.
However, once portal B rematerialised (assuming the portal could survive the teleport in the first place), it would once again be a viable portal. But only to other portals in it's current time.

Updated map.

It's now at http://forums.thinking.withportals.com/dload.php?action=file&file_id=112

Played it, beat it without the use of the gravity gun. Enjoyed it. Groovy.

I did notice one problem:

http://members.shaw.ca/lorithad/Portal/ ... ng0002.jpg

You can see it along that entire bar.

And I think the door keeps sparking when it opens that little crack. Irritating sound, as you're nearish to it for a little while. Perhaps sparks when it's opening, a few seconds after, then sparks go away?

Ah but the thing about stasis is that the only thing that truly stops is your mind. I've not heard of one sci fi claim about stasis where the body isn't alive to some degree still, just slowed down a considerable amount. In the slow teleport they got sent to zen and then back to our dimension. Which is exactly what time travel is all about, plus if you really think about it going back in time creates paradoxes and no one wants to deal with those...gets way to confusing and then you run into butterfly effects which pretty much nullify time travel into the past at all. But going into the future creates zero problems.

Lorithad wrote:
Played it, beat it without the use of the gravity gun. Enjoyed it. Groovy.

I did notice one problem:
http://members.shaw.ca/lorithad/Portal/ ... ng0002.jpg

You can see it along that entire bar.

And I think the door keeps sparking when it opens that little crack. Irritating sound, as you're nearish to it for a little while. Perhaps sparks when it's opening, a few seconds after, then sparks go away?

How exactly did you solve it without the gravity gun? More exactly, how did you obtain the box off the button while keeping a portal in the glass room?

That was a little tricky. But I believe the way I did it, was I positioned the box on the button in a way that I could jump and grab it from the lower platform. So I had a blue portal on the platform, then an orange portal inside the next room. I took the cube off, went through the blue, and the rest is easy.

Update: Finally! I've decided that the puzzle concept doesn't have any glaring errors, so the level is now almost final. Just need someone to run through it and try to break the game and/or get stuck.
Also, autosaves are in.

Now the tube at the end should suck you up and push you down it. The middle of this tube will be the transition to the next level. (I haven't tested it yet, so I'm not sure if this will work.)

The link is on the first post.