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[SP] Test Area Zeta: Chamber 01

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Hey cool, glad you liked it. :)

I'm really curious about the bug you ran into,

Spoiler
when you say "the large panels in the middle of the water" do you mean the big platforms that when extended line up directly next to the two big glass panels? That's really interesting if you were able to get to the other side of the slime without those popping up. There should be a trigger that fires when you enter that area that automatically starts part of the "chamber initiation" sequence (wall panels retracting, spotlights turn on, etc) and then when you look generally towards the pit the platforms should rise up. Wonder if the trigger_look that fires the I/O for that doesn't have a generous enough POV limit. I'll definitely look into it.

If it's possible to easily reproduce it, would be able to record a demo by any chance? There are some instructions on how to do so on the Valve Developer Wiki. Would help a ton, but if you're not able to it's no biggie.

To your second point,

Spoiler
that's a good observation. I'll look into making that less dangerous. The original 'water pit' concept that I had actually required you to 'fling' yourself out of the pit in order to escape. There are two hint icons at the bottom of the pit to this effect, and perhaps those are no longer necessary since most people seem to just use the ceiling tiles. Those tiles were actually added later on, so definitely an oversight on my part that you can fall into the water so easily from them. Thanks!

And for the last thing you mentioned,

Spoiler
disabling the 'water' pipes after the first button press was actually a recent addition I made in v1.1 and had to do with an issue where I was basically overloading the sound 'buffer' (dunno what the right word is for it). Basically with the water constantly splashing it created a lot of separate sounds to play, and then along with a ton of panel opening/closing sounds you can occasionally get a 'TOO MANY SOUNDS. >= 96' error when you have developer mode on. I didn't really think much of it at first, but a buddy of mine actually reported getting a crash to desktop at one point and I thought perhaps it might have something to do with it. Disabling the water after it was no longer necessary to the puzzle was an attempt to avoid this, but if it's confusing then perhaps I'll keep them running rather than shutting off in the next revision.

Keep 'em comin people! Got some really good notes here.

I noticed a few texture issues, specifically using wrong ones. On a few of the walls you used dirty white panels when everything else is in a very "clean" style. You also used the 1940's "target" texture. The puzzle was short and sweet though, I liked that you kept re-using the laser and cube for different things all within the same area. A lot of maps have single testing element purposes and make the gameplay fall really flat; you did a really great job of avoiding that.

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I enjoyed the tone you set for the map: it had wheatley's clean style, but Glados' evil spark. The puzzle was designed well and thoroughly used portal's puzzle mechanics properly. The use of the laser and gel were creative. The stairs and panels that you used to help navigate the map added a much interesting component to the map.

Well done. 5/5.

great map!
after playing it through a couple of times i found a few things...
- It is possible to jump through the water pipes and go in the area behind them...
- I was able to reproduce Mr. Happy's glitch with getting to the other side without the middle platform's coming up.. If you stick to the wall away from the good you don't trigger the trigger... you could fix it by extending the trigger to the roof, that way even if you fling yourself you will still trigger it in mid-air
- I was able to complete the chamber in 3 portals :)
also... the cube gets stuck in the dropper sometimes...

Cool, thanks for the reviews guys.

monkeyman wrote:
- It is possible to jump through the water pipes and go in the area behind them...

Haha, interesting. Never underestimate the weird stuff people will try. ;)

Makes sense, the models likely aren't set as solid. I'll stick a clip in there on the next revision. Thanks!

Quote:
- I was able to reproduce Mr. Happy's glitch...

Cool, I'll get it patched up. Thanks for the confirmation on the bug, I'm actually out of town at the moment so I haven't been able to do so myself yet.

Quote:
also... the cube gets stuck in the dropper sometimes...

This is really weird, I noticed this once or twice and spent a lot of time trying to sort it out. I wasn't able to reproduce it before I released it, but looks like it may have snuck in again.

The really confusing part about this is that I'm using Valve's official instance for the dropper! Wonder if anyone else has run into it, I can't think of anything that would be unique to this map that might cause this. I'll continue to look into it.

I found a little alternate method that is pretty useless unless you're like me and overlook that which is obvious :) (I totally thought I had the intended method until I watched Djinndrache's video)
It's a different way to get up to the big button. I made a demo of it because it didn't seem like a picture would really explain it. Unfortunately there's areas covered in blue gel that doesn't show up in the demo, but it should be pretty obvious where it is spread.

I first jump from an area covered in gel, down through a portal on the surface where water splashes, then the surface I land on is also covered in blue gel so I can jump back through the portals all the way up to the high ledge. The interesting thing is that the portals are placed so the water that goes through comes out at an angle and just falls into the acid pit, leaving the gel covered surface under the portal alone.

zeta.rar

Overall I really enjoyed this map. I'm not a harsh critic on visual style, but I could tell there's some skill was put into this map. I loved the re-use of puzzle elements.

For some reason the stairs that pop out to give access to the big button once it's been pressed seem like a bit of an eyesore. That's really my only nitpick though.

Really good mapping. Challenging puzzle concepts and well executed. Thanks .....

Unfortunately, this map causes Portal 2 to crash on my computer (something I haven't experienced with any other maps). The crash always seems to occur when I'm around (in or near) the pit with the water pipes at the bottom.

The puzzle looks rather interesting, so I'll try the map out on a laptop tomorrow to see if that makes a difference.

On a related note, does anyone know how to save an error log in Portal 2? I tried "log on" but the resulting file merely records the creation and subsequent closing of the log file.

Thank you for this wonderful map. I've given it a 5/5.

On my second play-through, the game crashed while I was in the pit. And I noticed some inconsistency with texture use, but that has already been mentioned.

If this is your first map, I'd love to see what you're capable of with more practice.

PrejudicedNanobot wrote:
Unfortunately, this map causes Portal 2 to crash on my computer (something I haven't experienced with any other maps). The crash always seems to occur when I'm around (in or near) the pit with the water pipes at the bottom.

Same here. It crashed three times shortly after entering, before I got to do much more than looking around a bit. Then started with a completely new game (the previous attempts were first starting from a different custom map savegame+map command and then from the savegame of this map) to launch the map command from. But this still crashed eventually. But I did get a bit more testing done.

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