Checking things off...or not

I finished the sticker and poster a couple days ago.

My Portal 2 map and Backstock work haven't had any progress lately. My desktop has failed to go to hybrid sleep twice (fade to black followed by a hang) and both times Steam has decided it needs to "update" Portal 2. "Update" meaning download all 6.6GB of content and completely replace all files.

I've tried moving all existing Portal 2 content to the download directory, but I didn't change the timestamps and a casual glance did not reveal a progress log. So, Steam proceeded to redownload everything.

Checking game cache integrity doesn't help either. It just says "1 file failed to validate" and continues downloading everything. Subsequent checks freeze and make Steam unusable ("Hey, Hey wait. Validation window is active, can't let you do that, Dave."), while it continues to download everything. I haven't checked after it finishes downloading. Mainly because I'm afraid it'll start downloading everything again.

Setting "Do not automatically update this game" once the download starts doesn't do anything (makes sense, but only if files are overwritten; they aren't until everything is downloaded). I've set it again and disabled cloud support to see if this download frenzy starts again.

I can start the Authoring Tools while the download is going, but once the download stops and file moving begins, things will get hairy (locked resources). It doesn't matter anyways because the game won't start. Well, it will in that it loads the intro video (completely ignoring the global -novid parameter set in Steam) and then crashes because it can't find the background image (materials/console/portal2_product2_widescreen.vtf). This crash isn't new as the Source Filmmaker couldn't handle this error when it came out, either (I haven't started it since).

You'd think Valve could, I don't know, have a default color to display should the background not exist. Maybe the error I see is the start and the game simply goes into catastrophic failure so fast, it can't show all the other errors (given the error box spam I've seen since Windows 98 SE, I doubt this is the case), but that doesn't explain why the game doesn't die until I acknowledge the missing background (suggesting there are no other errors to show).

Also, Steam is ignoring game activity. It used to stop downloading if I so much as started the Portal 2 Authoring tools. Now, it keeps downloading regardless of what I start (also confirmed with a friend's machine). Steam just sucks up all available bandwidth until it is sated.

Steam is still intermittently starting games other than what I double-clicked on. "Double click on Borderlands 2? Well, I'd better start Blade Symphony." I use the alphabetical list and don't recall it choosing a game after my choice alphabetically, just before.

Portal 2 - Thaumaturgy Post Mortem Part 2

I forgot some things.

Hiding player-facing walls:

Okay, my original idea had the cube sliding back and forth in its room. When a weighted cube was lifted off the button, the circuits would move away and when placed, the circuits would move back. I had a little physbox on the back of each circuit that, when passing through a trigger, would hide and disable their respective circuits. However, the trigger wouldn't constantly fire it's outputs like it did in Here a Second ago. Instead, it'd fire once and not work until I disabled it, moved the circuits away, and re-enabled it. I still haven't figured out why that's the case.

I considered making the physboxes cover the entire surface of the circuit backings, but decided against it for some...reason... *shrugs*

Anyways, in the current build, if the weighted cube is not properly placed into its button, the wall hiding trigger will be enabled prematurely and some walls will not disappear making it hard to either a) complete the circuit or b) get into the interior. The trigger has a half-second delay so if you unpress the button too soon, it won't enable, but that's the best I've come up with so far.

Sliding:

As mentioned above, the cube initially moved back and forth. But as my control model moved more toward a realtime control, it became harder to make sure the cube would be flush against the wall. Since I could have arbitrary angles, the cube would clip into the walls, not something I wanted.

With my main method of getting into the cube gone, I thought about using linked_portal_doors, portalable surfaces, and light bridges as alternatives. As usual, the linked_portal_doors had a bug. In this case, once I stepped through into the cube, everything on the other side would disappear except world geometry and shadows. Portalable surfaces weren't very appealing as I'd have to cut more holes into the walls, thus making the solution either impossible or too easy. So, I settled on a light bridge.

Portal 2 - Thaumaturgy Post Mortem

So many things just didn't work in this map...oh where to begin.

Cube Rotation:

First, I wanted the circuit cube to move to the same position as the cube only when placed in the button. This led to a set of 20 triggers, a func_tank, 6 info_targets, and several momentary_rot_buttons. It was promising until I couldn't get it to match exactly due to how func_tanks don't have a continuous motion when going past -90 (Up). They spin in place and this threw the momentary_rot_button that controlled the face spin off.

The next iteration was a bunch of momentary_rot_buttons for each axis parented to each other. First run didn't work out. I needed a way to dynamically set the parents to prevent orientation distortion. I put a func_rotating in, but they aren't reliable for exact rotations. Even when set to 90deg/sec and spun for 1 second, they slowly become more and more inaccurate because the "stop" command doesn't happen exactly 1 second later.

So, I decided to try scripting it all. After spending 4 hours trying to get a basic "hello world" working (you would not believe how little there is for vscripting tutorials. It's all "here's the reference and what I've done, have at it!"), I managed to get a button to execute a function (Using the console is unreliable. It seems to work more often when you actually have parameters to pass. Not having parameters results in errors because Source doesn't want to search for your PerfectlyCapitalizedFunction() and searches instead for PerfectlycapitalizedFunction() thus throwing an "It doesn't exist!" error).

Anyways, I setup a basic "AddDegreesToX(x)" function for each axis and put the script on a single func_brush. Once the brush was flipped on any two axes (180), adding or subtracting past 90 on the third axis would result in jittering. This jittering made no sense either. Why? My debug output was telling me -90 - 1 = -89 AND -89 -1 = -90. Same went for 90 + 1 = 89 and 89 + 1 = 90. Source refused to do proper math.

This led me to believe I had to do 3d programming in Squirrel. Let's just say that didn't go well. All the code I found was immediately broken because my initial angles were zero and 0 * cos(angle) - 0 * sin(angle) =, you guessed it, zero. The tutorials I found were all for manipulating the actual vertices of a cube with each face represented in matrices, not rotating a 3d model in a game engine. I never took 3d programming and, frankly, my head was spinning at that point.

However, that got me thinking I should use multiple rotators and just parent the circuit cube to the one I needed at the time. Well...it kind of worked. It appears logic_measure_movement copies and pastes angles, so every time I changed parents, the circuit cube was given an entirely different set of angles instead of just adding to its own.

I took a break from all that programming to go with a more visceral method of manipulating the cube: Walking into a projector that shows arrows that, when pressed, rotate the cube in that direction. The code was already there, I just had to build the button framework and implement player view/collision separation. Piece of cake, right? Well, I ran into that little issue of "when you rotate enough on two axes, you flip the third". This effectively reversed the function of the buttons on that third axis, not good.

So, I tried again, but instead of keeping the buttons stationary, I made them move with the cube's angles through another logic_measure_movement. It worked to a point, but after enough rotations, the problem came up again. Solution? Use the "rotating axes" idea to parent the buttons only to the axes they didn't rotate. So, X would rotate along YZ, Y along XZ, and Z along XY. While it looked kind of cool, it only made the problem occur sooner instead of not at all. Also, I was getting motion sickness from being a ghost inside a rotating cube. I abandoned the button idea at this point.

Next, I tried using a logic_measure_movement on a weighted cube, but I couldn't separate the translational data from the desired angular data. So, I went back to scripting and made a small function that copied the angles of a SourceCube and applied them to a TargetCube; no translational data transferred. That worked perfectly, until I changed the TargetCube from the model to a brush. Model-to-model worked fine, but model-to-brush rotated the angles by 90 on the Z (or is it Y? Whichever is up in Source) axis.

There was also this annoying bug where instead of setting the degrees exactly, 359.1 degrees would become -.9. so everything was a little off. I resolved this by going back to a model-to-model...uh..model, using a logic_measure_movement on the TargetCube and having it influence the CircuitCube. And that worked perfectly, again. Each rotation of the SourceCube was piped through the entities and correctly applied to the CircuitCube. So, the pipeline was SourceCube - > script -> TargetCube -> logic_measure_movement -> CircuitCube. Awesome.

The circuits:

I had circuits from my first "Circuits" map. They were alright, but I didn't like the fact I had the triggers outside of the instance and didn't really have a way to track the "flow" without explicitly setting one up. For a 3D cube where you can set many paths, this wasn't going to cut it. So, I dove in and rearranged the internals of the instances and added triggers and movelinears to function as flow control. If a trigger is hit, its corresponding movelinear moves up to hit the next trigger in sequence. This was doubled up so the circuits could be bidirectional if desired.

The new circuits worked like a charm except when it came to arranging them into a cube.

First, there was an annoying bug back when I had the cube parented to a momentary_rot_button. Each circuit's backing was a func_brush that was then parented to the center of the cube, a momentary_rot_button. It turns out "using" a func_brush parented to a momentary_rot_button will cause the button to rotate partially with respect to the axis selection. I turned on Developer 3 and ent_messages_draw 1 just to see where the erroneous i/o was coming from and there was nothing. No links whatsoever. The bug even persisted when both the brush and the button were set to ignore +use! This was eventually solved when I settled on making the CircuitCube's center a func_brush driven by the scripted movement measure system.
*Note: Parenting the brush to a physbox parented to the button did not produce the error at all*

Next, it turns out moving triggers will trigger with no apparent provocation when moving and they'll stay triggered until they hit a nice 90 degree angle (and sometimes, not even then). Needless to say, this was a big problem as it meant if you spun the cube right, you could glitch your way through the map. Sadly, this wasn't fixed. Filters don't even combat this. Sure, I disable them before motion, but if you enable them and they aren't at an angle they like, they'll fire their outputs.

I still didn't change the method of circuit rotation. I have a nice script to handle it and, since they only rotate on a single axis, it *should* work. Since I haven't released the map, I may still try it so you get a better experience.

And then I forgot to turn off the Afterburner OSD and had to record the run-through video twice.

Getting -hijack working

While working on my latest Portal 2 map, I noticed I chose the wrong compile settings (Expert -> default) versus what I normally choose (basic -> no vrad). Both have extra command line parameters, but have different resolutions and it was the resolution that tipped me off (I usually hit F9 immediately followed by Enter and don't see the compile window). This wasn't a big issue since the map is relatively small and vrad doesn't take that long (5 seconds or so). However, when I went for a recompile, I changed back to the basic compile window and found -hijack working again. Subsequent recompiles using either compile window worked fine as well.

The annoyance since DLC 1

For those who have been following this blog or my YouTube videos, you'll know that I've been having problems getting -hijack working after Valve released Portal 2 dlc. So, I was ecstatic for a bit...then I closed the game and in the next instance -hijack stopped working. This prompted me to look at the options I had to see if they matched up.

The expert window had "+sv_lan 1" in it, but that was really it. That change didn't have an effect on whether -hijack worked, so I decided to look at how the game started up by making the compile window wait for keypress before closing.

For the working -hijack (expert compile), this is what it showed:

"g:\valve\steam\steamapps\common\portal 2\portal2.exe" -hijack -game "g:\valve\steam\steamapps\common\portal 2\portal2" +map "temp" +sv_lan 1 -novid -sw -w 1152 -h 864

The broken -hijack compile showed this:

g:\valve\steam\steam.exe -applaunch 620 -game "g:\valve\steam\steamapps\common\portal 2\portal2" -hijack -novid -sw -w 1440 -h 900 +map "temp"

So, a basic compile runs the game through Steam instead of the Portal2 executable directly. After seeing this, I opened up Process Explorer to see what each runline turned into.

Working:

"g:\valve\steam\steamapps\common\portal 2\portal2.exe" -hijack -game "g:\valve\steam\steamapps\common\portal 2\portal2" +map "temp" +sv_lan 1 -novid -sw -w 1152 -h 864 

Not Working:

"G:\Valve\Steam\steamapps\common\Portal 2\portal2.exe" -game portal2 -steam  -game "g:\valve\steam\steamapps\common\portal 2\portal2" -hijack -novid -sw -w 1440 -h 900 +map temp  -novid
(I don't know why -novid has two spaces infront of it instead of one.)

Running the game with or without the -steam parameter didn't change anything. So I tried messing with the order, specifically where -hijack was placed. No change. Using either runline didn't make a difference. They both worked perfectly. This lead me to believe it was the initial start that made the difference. Maybe Steam wasn't passing -hijack through and was continually blocking it as part of some "is the game running" check that hasn't taken -hijack into account.

And...that was it (perhaps not the speculation bit). If Portal 2 is started via Steam, -hijack doesn't work. Starting portal2.exe directly eliminates this problem. Huh.

I don't know if this applies to other Source games as I currently only develop for Portal 2, so if you're having this same problem, try it. Stick your parameters into an expert compile and use it instead of the basic compile window...or batch it all.

I tried batch compiling Test Map Pack 3 or 4 a few times...vrad threw a fit and botched the lighting in all of the maps. I had to execute one after the other in separate commands by hand. Placing line after line in a batch file was not to vrad's liking.

Restoring The Witcher 2 backup saves

I finished The Witcher 2 on Iorveth's path today. So, I decided to restore the Chapter 1 big decision save I made so I could go through Roche's. After backing up and clearing my Iorveth saves, I extracted the big decision save and started the game. And...the Steam Cloud restored my saves and The Witcher 2 completely ignored my save.

So, I deleted all the saves again, restored the one I wanted, and turned off the cloud. Still nothing. So, I tried restoring every single save I ever made. This resulted in the game botching their playdates and presenting them out of order with some missing their thumbnails. Quit out, delete, and restore the single save with cloud storage enabled. My save was ignored, but the cloud saves were present. This prompted me to delete each save through the game's interface to delete them from the cloud.

This made sense in theory, but only resulted in an undeletable thumbnail due to its corresponding savegame being deleted without it (I have no idea how Steam could miss deleting the thumbnail). This meant that I couldn't reduce the cloud storage for The Witcher 2 to 0 bytes for some forum post's magic condition that makes the game read from the My Documents savegame folder again.

This was followed by another 45 minutes of screwing around with changing CloudStorage=false in User.ini, enabling/disabling cloud storage both ingame and out, and trying to force the cloud to load my manual save by getting the file sizes and names, tweaking times, and generating Sha-1 hashes for my save and its thumbnail. I even cleared the gamedata registry value to see if that would help. No dice.

I came across a post about the patch that broke savegames due to compression and suggested that version mismatch between the game and the save was the problem. So, I verified The Witcher 2's game cache integrity. About 35% through, I decided it was taking too long and cancelled the operation. I tried to start The Witcher 2 again, but I guess the verification purged all the registry entries and Steam tried to do the first time setup again. This meant I had to manually set the registry values again since even after running the first time setup, steam will fail to set the "I'm done" registry entries for each step except DirectX. For reference, I've copied the posts I used to fix this here:

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Quote:

Originally Posted by Who Cares Another solution involves a registry hack. open regedit and go to (on 32 bit XP that is): HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Valve\Steam\Apps\20920 Should show: default REG_SZ (value not set) DirectX Reg_DWORD 0x00000001 (1) Need to add dotNetFX40 Reg_DWORD 0x00000001 (1) vcredist Reg_DWORD 0x00000001 (1) Adding a value: right click, select new, select DWORD fill in the name of the value, double click and fill in 1

For 64-bit win7 it's:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Valve\Stea m\Apps\20920--------------------

Once those keys were set, I put copies of my save in both the My Documents savegame folder AND the steam 20920 userdata savegame folder, turned on cloud saving, and started the game. IT WORKED!

I think something about verifying the game cache purging registry keys fixed it. To make certain it wasn't a fluke, I loaded the game, make a quicksave, quit the game, restarted it, and both saves were there. I still have that annoying thumbnail sitting there, so I need to screw with its filesize and try to force the Steam Cloud "FILE MISMATCH!" prompt to appear.

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I'm debugging a Portal 2 map idea right now. I am starting to loathe linked_portal_door. It can't move, flickers, and crashes (The ent, not the game) if a func_brush passes through it. This is crippling my idea something fierce. The initial idea was great and I managed to reduce its implementation complexity by substituting existing entities in place of reinventing the wheel, but I'm hitting that "Source can't do that" wall again.

Just another post

I picked up Dead Island during the Steam Summer Sale after watching the GameTrailers review. I have an odd feeling that they played the console version because, well, the PC version is terrible. I'm noticing a trend where I say "Game X is screaming console port!" and I think it's because, well, I keep playing games that are console ports...but anyways, this one is definitely in that category.

The following is a list of things that I...noticed while playing the game:

• Rebinding the Use key doesn't completely work. There are instances where I had to press the originally bound key to do anything.
• No quickslot keys. I have to use the middle mouse button to pull up a radial menu.
• The camera moves a little until the mouse moves past a threshold wherein the radial menu completely redirects input. So, the radial arrow AND the camera both move for a little bit.
• Switching weapons into radial slots takes a second before it registers. So, if you exit the menu too quick, your weapon won't switch spots.
• You have to sell stacks of items one, at, a, time.
• Inventory is categorized and placed in one huge list.
• Not sortable.
• I can carry bottles of bleach, several cans of food, bottles of water, nails, batteries, large batteries, a dozen bottles of champagne, and several engine parts, but can't carry more than 16 tonfas, 75 pistol bullets, 90 rifle bullets, and 30 shotgun shells.
• I get it. The tonfas are weapons and the rest are misc/crafting materials, but I raised my eyebrow at this several times because, if you're going to be somewhat realistic about ammo, why stop there?
• Skill descriptions persist instead of only appearing when the mouse hovers over them.
• They also obscure everything underneath them, so you have to click around in order to reveal the skill tree.
• Some descriptions are a bit...weird.
• If I alt+tab, vsync turns off.
• I've lost audio for everything but cutscenes once. No idea why.
• No FOV slider
• Shotguns or assault rifles at point blank range tend to do no damage to npcs, but npcs can shoot you at the same range.
• If I aim at an enemy and fire, it'll miss when the second shot from the same position hits. Yes, guns sway, but when the sway never takes you off the target (at around 20ft), shouldn't I hit?
• Gun specialist with no guns for the first quarter of the game.
• Except for her Fury.
• Mouse acceleration dramatically different between the menu and ingame.
• Too low and your camera is perfect, but your mouse has to run the length of a football field in order to get anywhere in the menus.
• The blood effect I had on screen has become a white, textureless blur. <-- I'm a bit concerned about this one. Better retest my graphics card.
• I got killed by a car door as I exited a vehicle while it pulled to a stop.
• My checkpoints are always where the main quest is, not where it says "checkpoint saved" or whatnot.
• Cars disappear if you venture more than 100 yards away from them. "Why yes, I wanted to trek across the entire island to turn in this quest."
• In one quest, you can't leave a key character in the SAFE ZONE without failing a quest and being forced to restart. However, you can leave said character in the middle of nowhere with no defenses whatsoever.
• If I have a stack of medkits, but my inventory slots are full. I cannot pickup another medkit and add it to the stack until I drop a weapon, pickup the kit, and then pickup the weapon I dropped.
• One cutscene sequence at a police station has no sky and reminds me of the hall-of-mirrors from the Source engine. Repeatable and only this cutscene, not the others.

Fortunately, a few key issues were addressed using Dead Island Helper and I've been enjoying the game. However, I've been running into the "No mic = ban" groups. Yes, yes, voice chat is very useful for coordination, but I've had enough people abusing it in the past to a) turn it off and b) not bother finding out what is wrong with my mic (bass boost/constant hum).


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Anyways, I'm thinking about releasing my black leather duster clothes model for Skyrim. It's still giving me this weird stretched polygon issue. I'll have to start it from scratch to ensure all vertices keep their numbers. This does annoy me because, as I've said before, the heavy model was the original scaled up in places to accommodate a thicker body. Nothing else was changed, even the weightmaps are the same.

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I tried getting another Portal 2 map fleshed out, but wound up starting yet another one and tweaking my Backstock map. And now, I've forgotten to work on any of them because I've been running around in Dead Island ("Get money's worth" *grumble grumble*).

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2k Games has put up their, what seems to be, quarterly "QA Testers needed" posting on Craigslist. I've applied in the past, but never got a response, not even an automated one. Now, I'm not sure I even want to drive 45 miles and pass LAX twice a day. I think I once calculated that the money the job paid was not enough to cover the cost of driving to and from their general location. Making negative income, brilliant! Of course, whatever I concluded from that is void because the vehicle I drove then had its transmission die (100mi from home no less) and I now have a more fuel efficient car (No, I didn't buy it. It was a gift and I can't even cover the insurance or car wash. My parents have to.).

I really want to get a job in which I either fix PCs or work on some aspect of Game Development (or both!), but about 75% of the applications I've sent out never received a response of any kind. The 25% that did were mainly for programming positions where I bombed the phone interviews because my vocabulary was terrible. I know what I'm doing (mostly), but can't express it in the exact textbook technical terms they want. I'm only applying for entry level positions, mind you.

I did have an interview with a game publisher last year, but they misread my resume and thought I ran focus testing instead of being a focus tester. So, when that came up a quarter of the way through the interview, they just went through the motions to humor me. When I followed up saying thank you, I got no response back. When I knew I didn't get the job a month later (how could I not know from the get-go?), still no messages.

I'm finding that if I get an interview, I don't get responses back and any further attempts at contact are met with silence. I've been at it for almost a year and a half. I hate my job (i.e. job hunting) so much that I don't do it. I'm tired of these oneway conversations. At this point, my CS degree is worthless ("Oh, a degree. What else ya got?") and the only thing I've programmed in that time was a couple weeks ago. 10 lines of code to brute force calculate a number whose right edge on a number line would match the left edge of another number. Thrilling. Better slap that on the resume.

What really gets on my nerves are all the postings that are blatant "We want to exploit those of you who have lost your jobs because of the recession" positions. What I mean is for a part-time PC technician position, I had to have 5-10 years experience and previously worked on enterprise-level hardware and/or ran an IT department for a big company. The job paid $15/hr and was for some local PC repair shop (of course, they didn't say who they were, so I couldn't bike over and shove my resume in their face). The job was basic PC troubleshooting, some network troubleshooting, assembly, some part swapping, and the occasional house call.

I did apply for idTech camps as an instructor, but after blowing the bully question ("I'd ask him to stop and move him from his target. If repeated, I'd call him out. If continued, I'd put him outside."), I didn't get the job, much to my relief; I'm a terrible teacher. This was the "Oh fine, why not?" application. Of course, now I can mark "familiar with 3ds max". *sigh*

Portal 2 Map Maker versus Authoring Tools

I've been asked multiple times on Steam's Portal 2 Workshop why I don't use the Map Maker. Rather than make several consecutive posts to fit my answer each time (1000 character limit), I'm going to put it here and link to it whenever I'm asked.

Opening Map Maker generated maps in Hammer results in 128x128x128 instances that are annoying to work with. I would have to make a replacer instance to substitute my desired wall thickness, realign and fill in tile gaps as a result of the replacements, cleanup and reapply all overlays, add and adjust lights, and tweak lightmap resolutions. By that time, I would have to scrap it all just to get whatever idea I wanted to implement in. Yes, I broke reasonable order and put all the work first to make it sound like a bigger deal.

Furthermore, I require the amount of flexibility Hammer offers to build my maps. I can't do what I do in the Map Maker. There are too many constraints, hidden entities, and limited features; it's just too restrictive. There is no prototyping my ideas in the Map Maker. I build from the inside out. Start with an element and add onto it. Starting from the outside-in is a hassle I don't want to deal with.

If I'm trying to make an idea a reality for the first time, I have no clue what I'm doing. How thick do I want walls? Pfft. How should I know? "Wow, making that brush a *insert brush entity here* really throws a curve ball" "This area's shadows are too strong/weak. I've got to adjust that." "But what if I...ya...that'll work!" "I want a custom texture there." "Huh, the engine supports more i/o than the fgd shows, better fix that"

So, mostly, it is me being stubborn and hiding behind personal preference. The other part is this: "Can you make a ferris wheel in the Map Maker?" I didn't think so.

Also, you are locked to the clean visual style with no option to break up tile textures how you see fit. Now, I admit, I've been defaulting to the clean style in my later maps, but the lack of style options is a big turn off. And I can see why they wouldn't have it.

Making the option would most likely be easy, but tedious. If you so much as use a laser, you've made your map unable to be used for 1970's Aperture. Foliage would have to be cleaned out if you changed from the destroyed theme. You want bts? Well, be sure to flag what walls you want to keep and hope that the generated vactubes won't mess up your map. What's that? There are no arms in Old Aperture, so much for those elements.

In short, I started with Hammer and that's what I'm used to. The random crashes, stupidly high memory usage, occasional failure to update assets, complete failure to reflect model changes on props, and graphical glitches are all familiar. This Map Maker is not a replacement for it. It is a way for people to break into mapping. Now, advanced Hammer users have created amazing maps in the Map Maker. I'm just not one of them.

Test Map Pack 4 Released

I had to take a couple days to comb through the last 7 maps to iron some things out before release. For a twist, though, I actually had a couple people playtest the maps and provide feedback.

The maps this time around weren't as complex in implementation or concept as my others. I'm not sure what to make of that. I had fun anyways, so I don't think it matters.

Grab it here

For those that haven't played my other packs:
Test Map Pack 1
Test Map Pack 2
Test Map Pack 3

And here's my first released Portal 2 map (which was actually made while I was in the middle of Test Map Pack 1):
Bits or Pieces

Portal 2 - Don't Look Back video release

Took a while to get this together. I was working a lot on a mod and things didn't click for a bit.




I'm pretty happy with it. It does make me want to mess with material proxies again. You can achieve quite a lot with them.

I believe I have 7 maps done, so now I can get to compiling Test Map Pack 4. That means linking them up with transitions/triggers, compiling both HDR and LDR, playtesting, and packing materials.

I need to slow down time

I've been busy with mod work and following modelling tutorials. I'm recreating the head because it was too high poly compared to the body. So, I'm doing the box modelling approach instead of spline to help keep polycounts down.

The mod work has taken me away from actually making my own maps and bouncing ideas off the team has resulted in them doing the ideas instead of me. Sadly, I like to avoid doing what I've already seen done in Portal 2 (unless it's an improvement over what I've done before), so I'm back to the drawing board again.

So, here's a video of what currently isn't working out for me:




As usual, there's more information in the video's description.

Portal 2 - Push and Pull Video is up

I finally got Steam working again by deleting my botched skin and all files except my steam.log, screenshots, and DX:HR saves. Had to do a check with TreeSizeFree to see which folders contained screenshots and save files (I hate Steam's obfuscated userdata folders).

I had to restart Steam, again, and almost everything worked. I had to let it redownload missing game files (turns out not everything is in the SteamApps folder aside from saves/screenshots) and convert various games to the new file system that were already converted before I began (at least, I thought they were).

So, here it is: Map 6 of 7 for Test Map Pack 4. More details in the video description.