My friend Thomas here has been developing a Tesla Coil into Portal 2. Unfortunately creating one is a lot harder than expected. Our general questions are:

A: How do you create lighting bolts that tends to strike in one general area (in this case a metal pole) and will still strike the area the pole is in when the pole is moved?

B: How do you make the lighting active something on contact?

There's actually a nice point_tesla entity that does all the effects automatically. To sense bolts, the best way might be a spherical trigger around the coil set to the point_tesla's radius.

Additional it's always helpful to use env_beam. Set it's start point to the point_tesla and the end point to the object/info_target you want to strike at.
Using the noise keyvalue creates a "random" beam effect.

I would love to see that effect; combining a point_tesla with an env_beam. I imagine it would give you a "cloud" of static discharges while still having a single focused beam of energy that targets the pole. Should be a rather nice effect when finished. Good luck Caden.

Hi Just got a thinkingwithportals account Caden and I appreciate all you help and you can view the product here (It's not done yet still a work in progress)http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=113760262

FelixGriffin wrote:
There's actually a nice point_tesla entity that does all the effects automatically. To sense bolts, the best way might be a spherical trigger around the coil set to the point_tesla's radius.

Well, now that me and Tom have completed the Tesla Coil, I would like to know how to get rid of the spark effect (those orange dots the point_tesla makes when it hits something), as seen here: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/f ... =115710679
So I would like to know if it's possible to get rid of it.

Seriously, it seems like there ino way to remove them. There would be just the possibility of a workaround that could also effect other things using the same effect textures.
You would need to find out the texture names of the used textures for this spark effect, replace their VMT's with some pointing to a full transparent texture and pack them into your map via Pakrat to replace them ingame for everyone on your map.

I would have used an env_laser and set the noise to 25 to give it an electrical effect. Give them standard targets to zap intermitantly with the help of a self-triggering relay, and parent targets to any other objects you want zapped. Add a trigger surrounding your tesla setup and give it 2 outputs for onstarttouch and onendtouch that will change the env_lasers targets when you introduce your moveable objects to the tesla coils area of effect.

Just as an idea, though