E-Grill You Can Shoot P's Through/Portal Problems on Panels?
I have an excursion funnel that's aimed at a nearby white wall, essentially just a source, but I don't want players or objects moving through the portal they place to use the funnel. Right now I have a thin x of emancipation grill material that prevents this movement, but also makes shooting portals on the surface slightly more difficult and isn't terribly attractive.
I guess this question is a two-parter, with an opinion portion: Is it possible to shoot portals through an emancipation grill while retaining it's other effects, and if so, would that be too confusing to someone who may expect the grill to not allow portal-gun-beam-blasts to pass through it? It is fairly functional at the moment, but I'm curious about alternate solutions.
Secondly, rotating panels are a bit of a frustration to me right now. I have quite a few of them set up, with portalable material as one brush and non-portalable as another, then they both flip over together, and they "work," but they only allow placement of portals in a single orientation. I have them on the floor and ceiling, so this is less than optimal. I'm definitely considering just using automatic portal placement on these (as well as the above e-grill issue), but I'd like to do without if it's reasonable (the auto-placing still just feels wrong to me).
I also am not sure how to rectify the situation where the lighting of the panels is based on their initial position and not changed when they rotate around, I've put some lights in the little cubbies that are built behind them, but they generate pretty uneven light - is there a better solution than just manually tweaking the "cubby lighting" to make them pretty before they pop out?
EDIT: Also, they're currently set up to rotate and freeze when Pressed, then rotate back and freeze when UnPressed, which makes them jump to the beginning of an animation if you change (Pressed/UnPressed) states and interrupt their current animation. Is there a way to smooth that out? Maybe grab the current animation frame, and set the reverse animation to start on the corresponding frame? This is definitely less important than the other two panel issues...
Thirdly (lazily, I haven't looked very much into this, but if you want to encourage my lack of research, feel free to respond), as an alternative to panels I have some brushes that are pulled away to reveal white panels underneath, but need to remove the portals placed on the "under-panels" when the brush re-covers them. I imagine this is fairly simple, but again, haven't looked quite yet.
Thanks for any help you guys can offer, I look forward to sharing this thing with you soon - once I get it playing as smoothly as possible. Gameplay/puzzle first, prettiness second.
KBG
Climbing Companion
How about a metal grate or light bridge?
They stop you from moving and you can shoot portals through it.
To prevent the placement of portals in the wrong place
Info placement helper.
To prevent portal placement to appear in the wrong places
Func no portal volume
I think, for the second one, you just need to make your panel bigger. A portal is 64 units wide by 128 units high. If your panel is 128 units high, it will limit your portals to only being oriented one way.
Thanks for the thoughts, I'll look into those right now.
Can I just activate and deactivate "Func_portal_novolume" to clear an area of portals? I don't really know how that will work, but if you say yes I can play around with it.
As for clarifying:
This is how my (ceiling and floor) rotating panels currently allow portal placement (two M's represents ONE portal), vertical orientation only -
____________ ___________
|___________| |___________|
|__M________| |___________|
|__M________| |___________|
|___________| |_______M___|
|___________| |_______M___|
____________ ___________
|___________| |___________|
|_____M_____| |___________|
|_____M_____| |___________|
|___________| |_M_________|
|___________| |_M_________|
but I want them to allow ANY orientation, just based on where the shooter is shooting them from -
____________ ___________
|_M_________| |___________|
|__M________| |___________|
|___________| |_______M M_|
|___________| |___________|
|___________| |___________|
___________ ___________
|___________| |___________|
|___________| |___M_______|
|_M_________| |___M_______|
|__M________| |___________|
|___________| |___________|
Hopefully this helps, and hopefully this was the part that was confusing... (edited to fix the diagrams, just collapsed when built with "spaces")
Climbing Companion
That will only work wil the Sixense motion pack (portal surfing and rotation)
Tried making the panels bigger, huge in fact, but it didn't change the issue I'm having. I've got a little test map to demonstrate the issue that I can post if it's useful.
EDIT: Oh, and I don't need the portals to rotate AFTER they are on the wall, just be able to be placed from a variety of angles such that the "bottom" of the portal is created nearest the user, and the "top " furthest away - like a standard ceiling or floor portal.
Climbing Companion
The portals will always be they way you look at the panel, look west the portal is sideways, anyway use a info placement helper to make the portal turn sideways
Try shooting portals on both of these panels: Portals on Panels, Issue Clarification
Hopefully this makes things pretty clear.
Metal grate fills the purpose on problem 1 just fine, thanks for that.
Climbing Companion
Ok I know now. You can't make portals any orientation from where the shooter is shooting at, (unless you use an info_placement_helper) but that only forces the portal to 1 certain orientation.
For the panel lighting problem you can try to change the value "minimum light level" of the func_brush. This gives the panel a constant light level on both sides, so it only works if you have the same amount of light over the whole panel. It may also take a couple of tries to make it look realistic. I used it in my map and it worked better than putting a light behind the panel.