Quote from eviloatmeal on April 30, 2011, 1:11 am

Hmm... Could you spoiler me some hints? I can't seem to figure this one out.

Specifically:
[spoiler]The decals indicate the first step of the room is to remove the weighted cube from the cube receptacle.

It seems I need to use momentum to fling up out of the parallel floor tile underneath it, but the only way to get leverage while one of my portals is placed on this tile (since I can only place it while standing down there next to it) is to jump off the catwalk into the tile under the exit, and this does not give me enough momentum.[/spoiler]

Am I overlooking something / approaching it wrong? Am I just plain dumb?

Quote from Beer-Me on April 30, 2011, 8:10 am

Sure no problem, I might have to provide a sign to help illustrate it in the map.

[spoiler]You need to place a portal on the floor below cube platform. Lets call this portal A. Place a portal above exit door, this is portal B. Walk through portal A, and when you fall out, shoot portal B on the fall below you. You will then fly out portal A and you can grab cube, sometimes tricky to get off button.[/spoiler]

Your not dumb hah, it's obvious to me how to complete as I made it, so it's hard to judge how hard it is.

Quote from eviloatmeal on April 30, 2011, 8:28 am

Ahhhh, that's clever!

The rest of the level was pretty intuitive. It seems well built though, except for a small gap in the wall in the exit room.

[spoiler]I didn't really like the lasers though, there was no real puzzle there. Maybe because the receptacle in the floor is tall enough that the beam coming out of a cube hits it.[/spoiler]

Quote from Beer-Me on April 30, 2011, 9:31 am

Thanks for the feedback, greatly appreciated.

[spoiler]The laser part was never suppose to use cubes really to get the power across, I initially started to use a combination of portals to get the power across (using one cube also) but I figured you couldn't do that AND power the tractor beam. I will have a think and reconfigure the laser part.

The fling idea was actually a lot harder (involved greater timing/accuracy), you had to shoot a portal above the door and below, fall through gaining momentum and then shoot a portal below the cube. Then I realised after I got that working, you could do it the way I explained to you.[/spoiler]

Quote from Nightgunner5 on April 30, 2011, 11:44 am

I noticed a few things right off the bat: This map is very unoptimized, to the point where it is almost unplayable. This is probably also the reason portals are hard to make on the floor. Try mapping with a larger grid size (I suggest 8 or 16 units) and make sure all your brushes that are "in the middle of nowhere" (Like stairs and those windows) are func_detail.

[spoiler]The second thing is that it was really hard for me to figure out what piece of the puzzle I should do next. I assumed that I was supposed to use the excursion beam to get the cube near the "one dot" sign. After I figured out I needed to fling and I got the second cube on the button, I assumed I had finished the map and the door was broken because I didn't see the laser puzzle for at least two minutes.[/spoiler]

Quote from Beer-Me on April 30, 2011, 1:43 pm

Nightgunner5 wrote:

I noticed a few things right off the bat: This map is very unoptimized, to the point where it is almost unplayable. This is probably also the reason portals are hard to make on the floor. Try mapping with a larger grid size (I suggest 8 or 16 units) and make sure all your brushes that are "in the middle of nowhere" (Like stairs and those windows) are func_detail.

[spoiler]The second thing is that it was really hard for me to figure out what piece of the puzzle I should do next. I assumed that I was supposed to use the excursion beam to get the cube near the "one dot" sign. After I figured out I needed to fling and I got the second cube on the button, I assumed I had finished the map and the door was broken because I didn't see the laser puzzle for at least two minutes.[/spoiler]

Well the portals are hard to place on the floor due to the size of the pad, but it needed to be relatively small so it would shoot out right. I've now added a few more signs on the map and the exit door now has some tick boxes for each step so you know when you are missing one.

I've made the window boxes on the main gangway func_detail and I've removed a couple of cubemaps that were not needed and probably causing FPS issues.

Apart from that I'm not sure how to optimise it, so any funky shapes should be func_detail, regular chamber walls are okay as default, right?

Quote from Nightgunner5 on April 30, 2011, 2:28 pm

Beer-Me wrote:

Apart from that I'm not sure how to optimise it, so any funky shapes should be func_detail, regular chamber walls are okay as default, right?

Correct.

Quote from Quovatis on April 30, 2011, 11:45 pm

It's no fun when the portals don't take 70% of the time.

Quote from eviloatmeal on May 1, 2011, 2:33 am

Beer-Me wrote:

[spoiler]The fling idea was actually a lot harder (involved greater timing/accuracy), you had to shoot a portal above the door and below, fall through gaining momentum and then shoot a portal below the cube. Then I realised after I got that working, you could do it the way I explained to you.[/spoiler]

[spoiler]The problem with the momentum thing is that falling through a portal relies heavily on the portal helper, which will make sure you go straight through any portal at which you are aiming. For one thing, that makes shooting portals while falling into another portal very tricky in itself, but especially so because you had to go through a floor portal to do it. So you have to first nail a jump into the floor portal, followed by nailing the shot at the floor tile under the cube, which was insanely hard even standing on top of it, then in a split second look back down and aim at the portal you just jumped through in order to not land on the ground next to it.

This is why they put so many helper tools in the game, like the portal bumpers, the portal info aim thingies and so on.[/spoiler]