Updating PackBSP to work with Portal 2
I want to update PackBSP to support Portal 2. This may take quite a while, but I'd just like to reassure people that it is something I want to do. It'll take a while because it's not "just" Portal 2, but also a re-write to support many more games such as L4D2 and Alien Swarm.
If anybody can think of important ways Portal 2 differs from the previous engines (such as the inclusion of new Shader parameters) please post details here and I'll refer back to this thread when I manage to get far enough in the rewrite.
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TODO:
- Determine if there are new dependencies via "sound operator stacks"
Isn't Pakrat already updated to the new format? Chickenmobile and a few others said it was working.
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As far as I know PakRat is both closed-source and explicitly abandoned by the author with no updates for over five years. (It is Java, so there is a limited amount of upgrade-hacking you can do.) I don't know if it works with Portal 2 right now since I don't yet own the game.
The problem isn't so much the BSP format (the specific "pakfile lump" it modifies has not changed much, even if other parts have) but that PakRat won't be keeping pace with things like newer shader-parameters, TF2 level snapshots, particle manifests, settings on entities in Hammer, etc.
A few differences in favor of PackBSP:
- Open-source, so if I get hit by a meteor the project doesn't have to die too.
- Currently maintained.
- Reads the same FGD files Hammer uses (ex: recognizes TF2 control point icon textures)
- Can see inside GCFs, so it can tell you when something is truly "missing".
- "Crawls" all the assets in your map, including things like inspecting sound-scape scripts for WAV files.
- Exposes some things via XML configuration files (ex: if you are working on an obscure mod that uses $heatvisiontexture to point to a .vtf, you can use a text editor to tell PackBSP to "care" about that.)
(BTW, something seems to be messed up with the forum CSS for bulleted lists.)
Sounds good. Post here when you've released. Until then, Pakrat is pretty much going to be the defacto king as it's been around for ages.
Please do not Private Message me for assistance. Post a thread if you have questions or concerns.
If you need to contact the staff privately, contact the Global Moderators via Discord.