associating lasers with catchers
I played a map hosted here last year, I think called Try Anything Twice, which had colour-coded lasers, filter glass & associated laser targets. Mindblowing stuff, particularly picking apart the i/o logic (or at least trying to). This would be a great mechanic to play with in Portal 2.
Looking at the ent_info for the env_portal_laser & prop_laser_catcher, it seems that similar things won't be possible. There is a Color keyvalue but that just does a colour tint on the model texture, not the beam, & there doesn't seem to be a way to detect which particular laser powers a catcher.
On the bright side, there's a point entity version of the catcher (i forget the name, & it's not on the valve wiki yet) which might help with the filters.
So, I'm not the most experienced mapper & just wanted to ask if anyone can think of a way to achieve this.
the way HMW did the lasers in Try Anything Twice was very complicated and hackish, and basically he had env_beams that triggered in preset places if other env_beams hit there. As far as I know, this is impossible to do with the portal 2 lasers, and to get the same effect you'd probably have to do the same complicated method. Just FYI, you can download the prefabs for the laser effects here:
Try Anything Twice laser "SDK"
some progress: with the func_physbox onDamaged output you can forward the !activator, ie. the laser entity that's burning it, so you could cover the catchers with them & have them killed/template spawned when the correct beam strikes it.
filter blocks would be similar i suppose, haven't thought through those yet.
only thing left is changing the laser colours...