Forum | Thinking With Portals

#31 · November 15, 2011, 11:19 am

Sadly, I don't know why the water looks weird when you crouch in it.

Winner of the Nobel Prize for Being Immune to Neurotoxin

Thanks for over 1,000 downloads: The Cold Shoulder

#32 · November 27, 2011, 5:00 pm

Marise wrote:

Not sure if that ice in the blue gel room looks better or not, but I did try KillerBeeGee's idea. If anyone feels like checking it out, let me know if you think it works.

Sorry to say but I didn't notice the ice block in the first room at all I spent about 10 minutes trying to jump the water before I came here and sussed what was going on. If you can't get the ice to look right under the grill, maybe you could add an ice blower (with an off button) behind the gel panel? It would help people get familiar with the mechanics too.

Other than that I really enjoyed the map, fun and interesting puzzles

#33 · December 4, 2011, 11:15 am

Nice map, loved the freezingthawing mechanic!
Shame it was so easy though, would love to see maybe something like freezingunfreezing different pathways to different areas and stuff

p.s.
The first ice was showing as water still, little confusing!

#34 · December 8, 2011, 4:30 pm

Since there have been tons of exploit fixes since my last play, there we go for a new version:

dgVca9gDUQ0
(Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgVca9gDUQ0)

I'm glad how much I remembered about this map. Must have been a really good map

#35 · December 11, 2011, 4:52 pm

I am just wondering what texture you used for your ice as I would like to create a large, shatterable ice wall in one of my chambers. I don't want to use glass textures as that would make it look like it is just a really big window.

Wow! That was...uh, yeah. Just, yeah.

#36 · December 13, 2011, 7:02 am

Good map and interesting idea with the freezing mechanics.
I did not play your first map yet, that's why it was a little bit confusing to play this map.
Took me some minutes to understand how it works, but it was not to hard to find out.

Design / lighting of the map was a little bit odd - that's why I do not like this design.
Puzzles were easy - you just see what to do, when you enter the room.

All together I would rate this map 3.7/5.
I would love to see more maps with this mechanic, but please try some harder puzzles.

[back on TWP since 08. July 2017]
Steam: DrFauli

#37 · December 23, 2011, 6:12 pm

This was an EXCELLENT map! Clever ways to use the freeze/thaw dynamic with puzzles that require some thought but are not so complex they become frustrating. I really enjoyed playing through this. Great job!

#38 · December 24, 2011, 5:05 pm

Quote from x6herbius on December 24, 2011, 5:05 pm
Interesting gameplay concepts, though there were a couple of things I wasn't so keen on. My thoughts:

Good use of heat and cold to create new gameplay elements that required some thinking to achieve objectives with.

Ice, heat emitters, water cooling boxes (having played the original Cold Shoulder map beforehand, though I'm not sure to what extent it would apply if I hadn't done so) were all easily recognisable, and you generally knew what each thing did.

Textured and lit well.

Unfortunately there were some places where I genuinely had no idea how the part of the puzzle was supposed to work. For example, the heat emitter has no visible heat effect and so it was not at all obvious that the heat travelled through portals, leaving me stuck for quite a while at the blue goo dropper area.

In the room with faith plates to leapfrog over another pool, the first plate does not aim the player at the centre of the bullseye target, and there are no portal placement helpers to aid the player in placing the portal in the right spot. I crashed into the wall many times when it would appear that I was going to go through the portal. The second faith plate required two jumps on top of it to get back to the other side of the pool, the first jump merely pushing you about a foot into the air.

Regarding the small water pool that you have to crouch through, the strange bug there is a bug in the Source engine where the water shader will mess up if two or more volumes of expensive water lie at different heights in the player's current PVS. It can be solved by using cheap water, or limiting the player's view (areaportals/hint brushes also help) so that there's no possibility that they can see another volume of water on a different plane at the same time. Obviously the visual bug wasn't game-breaking, just looked a bit odd, but is passable considering it's a required part of the puzzle.

All water looks exactly the same, yet some will not hurt you if you step into it and some will. It would be useful to be able to differentiate between the two, possibly by using a murkier water material for the harmful water.

Overall, not a bad map which looks to have pretty good potential in regards to the heating and cooling of water, but I'd only give it 3 out of 5 at the moment due to the couple of bugs and occasional lack of clarity towards the way elements were supposed to act.

Interesting gameplay concepts, though there were a couple of things I wasn't so keen on. My thoughts:

Good use of heat and cold to create new gameplay elements that required some thinking to achieve objectives with.
Ice, heat emitters, water cooling boxes (having played the original Cold Shoulder map beforehand, though I'm not sure to what extent it would apply if I hadn't done so) were all easily recognisable, and you generally knew what each thing did.
Textured and lit well.
Unfortunately there were some places where I genuinely had no idea how the part of the puzzle was supposed to work. For example, the heat emitter has no visible heat effect and so it was not at all obvious that the heat travelled through portals, leaving me stuck for quite a while at the blue goo dropper area.
In the room with faith plates to leapfrog over another pool, the first plate does not aim the player at the centre of the bullseye target, and there are no portal placement helpers to aid the player in placing the portal in the right spot. I crashed into the wall many times when it would appear that I was going to go through the portal. The second faith plate required two jumps on top of it to get back to the other side of the pool, the first jump merely pushing you about a foot into the air.
Regarding the small water pool that you have to crouch through, the strange bug there is a bug in the Source engine where the water shader will mess up if two or more volumes of expensive water lie at different heights in the player's current PVS. It can be solved by using cheap water, or limiting the player's view (areaportals/hint brushes also help) so that there's no possibility that they can see another volume of water on a different plane at the same time. Obviously the visual bug wasn't game-breaking, just looked a bit odd, but is passable considering it's a required part of the puzzle.
All water looks exactly the same, yet some will not hurt you if you step into it and some will. It would be useful to be able to differentiate between the two, possibly by using a murkier water material for the harmful water.

Overall, not a bad map which looks to have pretty good potential in regards to the heating and cooling of water, but I'd only give it 3 out of 5 at the moment due to the couple of bugs and occasional lack of clarity towards the way elements were supposed to act.

#39 · December 26, 2011, 11:11 pm

I made a video walkthrough for this Portal 2 Custom Map:
j_Rn8jGVtVY

#40 · January 29, 2013, 12:44 pm

Because I never played this map and I saw it in the spotlight category I thought let's give it a go and record my blind playthrough:
http://youtu.be/o6Bd0n0FbM4

Get Portal Stories: Mel now!

[SP] Thaw