Reepblue's Notebook

It is not the big things that are an issue, it is the little things you can live without that are. The little things that are nice to have, seem easy to implement, but you end up making a bunch of nonsence to get it to work. This may not be with Hammer I/O, but as I learned with PUNT, it can be with code. Last night, I finally tackled something I wanted to do with the PUNT cubes in a while, and that is to make the player be able to pick up the cubes without the Puntgun. Why? Because how I modded the physcannon code, the pickup system is not the greatest. First, there was an animation bug, and no matter how many think functions, bools and other filters I placed, the bug kept coming back. When picking something up with the Puntgun, if you were to double click to pick it up, the model would animate to pickup and drop although the cube remained held.  Another thing is that randomly, the box would FLY across the map towards you if you tried to pick it up from a far. The pickup d...

Downloads MyApertureInnovations ThinkingWithPortals For a while now, I had this itch to make a map for the original Portal using the stock visuals, elements, and have it be a nice blast from the past. Back in June, I was playing with the functionality of instances with the 2009 SDK, and a test mod was created called Portal: 2012. I make sourcemods because I like the main game files stock in case of a problem. Along with playing with instances, I also edited the viewmodel position, the field of view, swapped some sounds and scripts around, made and ported a few things, and gave Portal an updated feel. I backed up the mod, and continued on other things. The folks at at MyApertureInnovations (Formally MyApertureLabs) are getting ready for a mapping contest, and I thought a nice, classic Portal map would make the map stand out from the other Portal 2 maps. However, while I was adding to the map, I've encountered many vvis and vrad errors, so that forc...

No, I'm not dead, but it looked like it with the lack of content. Its been a while since I've posted anything on Youtube and here. So what's been happening, well to be honest, nothing much. I'm trying to finish up school, I've been experimenting with code and ideas, and I've been working in Alive and Kicking. You may have a lot of questions, and I'll answer hopefully most of them here. First things first, Blue Portals. I know, its been since November since we posted anything! So what happened with that? Well, I originally wrote an article describing what has been going on with Refresh, and to my luck, Zilefile is no more, which contains a lot of WIP screenshots during the development of Blue Portals, Refresh, and other things. And since the maps were gone (They just needed to be recompiled and fixed up.), the article felt pointless without them. Here is the article: First off, we would like to thank you for being to patient on us, and we really feel bad...

As 2011, comes to a closure, its time to look back of all the nonsense I have done. I've put together a cheaply made video along with cheaply made royalty free music to summarize this not so cheap year. I don't go over every Hammer Notepad experiment, nor everything I did in just a day, but mainly things I've worked on (released or not) were I got some knowledge out of it. Life is just one big learning process. We start with Blue Portals: Extended Play. Blue Portals: Extended Play - March  After we got done with shipping Blue Portals and the update for it in late 2010, we worked on and released the extension: Blue Portals: Extended Play. This eight map mappack takes you back into the development center, and you now have access to the fully operational portal device along with the ECHO, a gravity gun like puzzle device. If you have the latest version of Blue Portals, it should already be there. If not, click the Download lin...

Ever since we were developing Blue Portals, we kept imagining how awesome Blue Portals will be in the Portal 2 engine with Blob tech, dynamic lighting and the whole bit. When Portal 2 went live, we config the Alien Swarm Authorizing Tools and started to work on Blue Portals 2 that May. It was in development on and off. We would be actively updating the mod for a solid week or two, then development would halt. Now there is more then one reason why we are pulling it. Blue Portals is a Portal mod that takes advantage of the I/O system. The mod showed how clever configuration of this system can produce neat things like Portalable light, Fans, Box types and many more! The original Portal did the same with its elements, as you needed to put together many entities to get box droppers, buttons and ball catchers to work, so the elements in Blue Portals worked liked that. In Portal 2, everything is coded, and when you compare it to the clun...

After realizing that the main game play is really flat, I decided to work into the game structure more. Before, you spawn, grabbed weapons, press the radio, and you killed Antlions until you die. Not really the thing that someone is going to look at it and go "WOW! THAT'S FUCKING AWESOME!". It was more fun playing it, but not much watching someone else. I'm not much of a programmer, the most I can do is take existing material and morph it into my own. And with this, most of the game rules are map logic. I decided to take a whack and use a system like the Nazi Zombies system with the weapons. Since Survival games are more 'arcade' games, I thought that this system will at-least help develop my own ideas. Again, using map logic, the player "buys" weapons, health, and others with his or her "points". But I could not get it to prevent purchases if the player was short. So, the game_score entity just makes a negative v...

After a whole summer of Hammer Notepad less videos, your probably wondering "What happened?" and you call back to when I use to post a video at least every month or so. Well its a long story. So lets start this from the top. Introduction: I have videos filled with Beta videos and interviews of Left 4 Dead, Portal, And Portal 2. And I still watch them even though I watched them hundreds of times over. Why? Well for some reason, watching videos like that gives me inspiration, and I say to myself "I wanna make something like this, with this style." Kinda silly since I have Left 4 Dead, Portal and Portal 2, but its not the same playing the retail and then watching a game in progress video. And If you know me, If I'm not creating something new, I'm recreating the old. I have the Left 4 Dead videos from QuakeCon 2007 and Showdown LAN, and I love the videos of them. Why? Well for those who don't know, In the older versions  of Left 4 Dead, (Remem...