Reepblue's Notebook

It has been over a year since the last blog post. Sorry about that. I would usually post things if I wanted to share information, talk about projects, or announce releases of Portal maps. So what happened? From the time I last post, PUNT has been on and off with it's development progress. With it, I learned so much more about the Source Engine, how to do more things with code, how the engine mostly works. So, even if it does not pull through, the things I learned are greater then the time I spent on it. So, is it dead? Tsh, No! After a while, I was questioning about the overall game play mechanics of the mod. I felt like it was just  "Press Mouse 1" type of game. You turned things on, you turned things off. There was no spark that Portal had. I talked about the game play changes on ModDB over the summer. This was a much more fun game mechanic, and it was really fun having power balls bounce all over the map! But with this, the Retro-Futuristic look had to go. In th...

People work on mods when they have spare time, and when they feel like it. But since last week, I've been working almost non-stop on PUNT since the art style change. Non stop development since November. There was always something I was doing for PUNT. To make developing easier, I composed the puzzles as separate maps and then later stitch the maps together. This would be slapping level transition prefabs to the ends of the map and re-saving under the final name. But while developing the chambers, I configured the 2009 tools to work with PUNT with a work around with appid and file reading. This gives me the availability to use instances which are the most useful thing when developing a mod, and a better model viewer that lets you see the loaded vmts. During the finalization process, the doors and other instance-able elements will replace the prefab counter parts, and the level changing prefabs will be slapped on. I already did this to some maps so far...

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...