If someone ever played the Flash version of Portal, you have in there two force fields that have no equivalent in Portal but sure could be fun :

• The red force field : portals can be shot through it, inanimate objects go throught, but living beings (aka the player) are killed on touch.

• The blue force field : portal goes through, but it acts as a wall for all other entities, including the player.

I'm sure the first one is doable quite easily with a trigger, but I don't know for the second one.

I was also wondering which visual effects we could use to render those fields. I was thinking about the combine inhibitor fields from HL2 and a recolor of those in red, but how can we make the effect of inhibitor fields in the first place? Would this effect color be changeable?

I wonder if you have any ideas about this, because if we can do those, they sure would allow quite a lot of new puzzles.

Hehe, I invented these two fields, Portal the flash version was made by me and my friend.
We had no idea about the real portal Fizzlers, It could add such a nice puzzles .
Anyway about your question, the red walls can be done easily with a trigger_hurt and for the blue one, you should open an HL2 map with these blue Combine gates that the player cannot pass through, we based our blue wall on these combine walls, I think that there is a Combine gate prefab in hammer, try to look into it.
About the look, for the blue wall use the normal combine one, and for the red one, I think you should edit the blue one texture in Photoshop and change it to red.
Good luck

As for the blue force field, use a brush with the Clip (I think it was) texture. Missiles (as in things fire by guns) goes through, but no other physics objects

The blue combine wall things dont let portals travel through them, i dont think. i'm not sure if you can change it, but i played through hl2 with the portal gun and portals got stuck on the blue forcefields.

In HL2 at some levels you can shoot through them and at some levels you don't, It's probably a flag that you can check.

Hyakkidouran wrote:
The blue force field : portal goes through, but it acts as a wall for all other entities, including the player.
I'm sure the first one is doable quite easily with a trigger, but I don't know for the second one.

Use a fence.
That's what I did when I needed something like that in my maps.

The colouring, red and blue, made me thing, could you make a fizzler that only let red portals through and one that only let blue portals through?

youme wrote:
The colouring, red and blue, made me thing, could you make a fizzler that only let red portals through and one that only let blue portals through?

Don't think so, because the entity deletes both as you walk through and none can go through, I dont think theres any flags that can be set to allow it either.

No flag at all. And no filter either.
But I'm still wondering what would be the purpose of blocking blue or red portals only. Aren't this two exactly the same ?

NykO18 wrote:
No flag at all. And no filter either.
But I'm still wondering what would be the purpose of blocking blue or red portals only. Aren't this two exactly the same ?

I think they mean blue/orange, I.E mouse click left, mouse click right. It would add more to the gameplay in custom maps if these kind of flizzers worked, but then again it would be hard to let them know you are allowed certain types, unless you gave the flizzer model (the one that "holds" the thing) a shade of red or something,

NykO18 wrote:
No flag at all. And no filter either.
But I'm still wondering what would be the purpose of blocking blue or red portals only. Aren't this two exactly the same ?

no

there are a few flinging puzzels where when you place a portal mid fling you have to use the right one, it doesn't matter which one, as long as it corresponds to one you have already placed. a re/blue only fizzler would force you to start with the right coloured portal, adding a teensy bit more of a challenge, but not much more really.

Oh, I see.
Sounds kinda frustrating to me.

I don't see how allowing only 1 type of portal through a fizzler would be interesting/fun/etc. seeing as both portals have the same function.

taco wrote:
I don't see how allowing only 1 type of portal through a fizzler would be interesting/fun/etc. seeing as both portals have the same function.

youme wrote:
no

there are a few flinging puzzels where when you place a portal mid fling you have to use the right one, it doesn't matter which one, as long as it corresponds to one you have already placed. a re/blue only fizzler would force you to start with the right coloured portal, adding a teensy bit more of a challenge, but not much more really.

taco wrote:
I don't see how allowing only 1 type of portal through a fizzler would be interesting/fun/etc. seeing as both portals have the same function.

Its equivalent to making everyone walk starting with their right foot. Not a useful distinction IMO.

I am only mildly interested in the other forms of fizzlers; for these reasons:

1) Stuff can go through; person dies if they do. The new facility map has one of these, actually. I pushed my cube through it and knocked the turret over on the other side. . .then I accidentally knocked the cube out of my hand while turning around so the cube was on the other side where there were no portable surfaces.
End result: an unreachable cube, with no easy way for the mapper to detect it. Time to restart the level. . . and if there WERE portable surfaces over there, then the killing part didnt really mean a whole lot, now did it? Used badly, this is a whole new nightmare for mappers. . .so its got a low ROI, IMO.

2) Portals can go through; people/cubes cant. Not complaing about that one at all; except that its already present. We already have that in two ways; that mesh texture (I forget the name), and the Combine energy field (as was already mentioned). Both are acceptable and easily identifiable, and one has the advantage that you can instantly turn it on/off. Lots of maps use one or both already, so its really not "new". Heck, its even a fair assumptin that glados can possibly get ahold of the combine tech, since its already established they are in the same universe.

Its not like walking on the right foot, because when walking you can do a double step and end up walking with the other foot first, if you construct your puzzle right you have to do a whole load of portal placements on after the other where if you use the wrong portal by mistake then you have to start again. It may not be a huge game mechanic but don't brush it off It could make some very interesting complicated puzzles

youme wrote:
there are a few flinging puzzels where when you place a portal mid fling you have to use the right one, it doesn't matter which one, as long as it corresponds to one you have already placed. a re/blue only fizzler would force you to start with the right coloured portal, adding a teensy bit more of a challenge, but not much more really.

Actually, by forcing the player to use a certain portal for the set up, it makes the puzzle easier.

youme wrote:
Its not like walking on the right foot, because when walking you can do a double step and end up walking with the other foot first, if you construct your puzzle right you have to do a whole load of portal placements on after the other where if you use the wrong portal by mistake then you have to start again. It may not be a huge game mechanic but don't brush it off It could make some very interesting complicated puzzles

Maybe I am still missing what you are saying. All of what you just said seemed to ALREADY be true, except that I currently get the right to determine which portal I start off with when I do that "whole load of portal placements where if you use the wrong portal by mistake you have to start again". You didnt add any complexity. . .it was already there if the puzzles needed a lot of portals.

So no, it just seems needlessly restrictive to me; exactly like saying we all have to start with the right foot. Hye you yourself even said:
"would force you to start with the right coloured portal,"

(replace "right colored portal" with "right foot", please. . .)

The grate texture already in the game allows portal shots to go through but blocks players and cubes.

I got one-portal walls working in this thread: post9419.html#9419

Don't know if anyone cares about that. You could easily zone off an entire section to be orange/blue only with the func_portal_detector - you'd just need some way of showing that a section is one or the other (lighting? custom overlay?). Is there anything in the source engine equivalent to the Unreal Engine's "special lit" texturing? You could set a wall to "special lit" which meant it would only render lighting from "special lit" lights. I guess a spotlight of some sort could do the trick.

Fizzlers would probably require a quick extension of current fizzler code and a particle redesign, neither of which I know how to do. (Sorry!)

I use a combine shield textured func_brush with solidity set to never solid, and a player clip brush surrounding it.

I guess use a trigger_hurt for the red one.