Now You're Thinking With Portals 171
Valve's got a new game in the works, and it's quite the mind-bender. Portal is a puzzle/FPS hybrid that will utilize holes in space to do the impossible. From the Ars Technica post: "That video makes my brain hurt in all the right ways. The set up and voice-over are both hilarious, and at first it seemed rudimentary to me. Then everything goes crazy and you start to realize just how much you can do with this technology. I'm looking forward to seeing fan-made videos hit the 'Net with all the insane stunts and tricks you can pull off. This seems to be one of those games that you'll have as much fun playing with the game as you do simply playing through it." This is a title definitely worth checking out for yourself.
A DigiPen Game (Score:5, Informative)
Narbacular Drop (Score:5, Informative)
Lots of people keep calling it a "Prey" ripoff, whether his idea came from "Prey" or not, its a completely different game imho.
Re:I think my brain just snapped (Score:2, Informative)
From the video the solution is quite simple.
The portal-gun looks like it will only allow 2 portals to exist at once (one leading to the other), so to break a loop you just fire your gun anywhere else, and the first portal created will disappear and be replaced by the new one.
Re:Narbacular Drop (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Narbacular Drop (Score:3, Informative)
Doom 3 physics:half life 2 physics::Prey portals:Portal portals
Portal progression (Score:1, Informative)
Blue
Red
Red
Blue
Blue
Red
etc.
When you create a new entrance or exit, it "overwrites" an old one, and the old one disappears.
Now, from what I can tell, if you make a new entrance, you can get to it via the existing exit, basically how the system works basically, but in reverse. However, if you create this new entrance and go through it, without placing a linked exit, you're now going against the natural progression of the portal system, and something weird happens. I think I've determined the action as either
- Being teleported to a random place in the level
or
- Being teleported through the "opposite face" of the existing exit, thus ending up on the other side of the wall.
or
- Something Else(tm)
At least, I think that's how it works o_O It's mostly guesses, and utterly confusing. It looks great though, and I'm thoroughly looking forward to playing it.
Re:doubt it (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Narbacular Drop (Score:4, Informative)
This is blatently incorrect. Prey DID show off their portal tech. (To just anyone and everyone they could!) What they couldn't do was make an actual game out of it. Cool tech, but it ended up being nothing more than a research project.
Fast forward to the 21st century. Any game maker who wants to implement Portal Technology is going to study 2 examples. The first one is Descent's 360 degree engine. The second is the Prey portal technology that allowed worlds to collapse in on themselves. Once you understand how portals work (it's a bloody easy concept [flipcode.com]), creating those effects follows quite easily.
So again, it's impossible to say that Portal and its predecessor were not influenced by Prey.
Straight to video (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Bandwidth Limit Exceeded (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Bandwidth Limit Exceeded (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Narbacular Drop (Score:3, Informative)
The idea of portals has been around for ages. Anyone who knows anything about 3D programming should know about the differences between Portals, Octrees, BSP trees, and so on.
In fact, if I remember right, Duke Nukem 3D was played essentially as a portal system with all the limitations of Doom. For instance, I once made a fun level which had a long ramp/tunnel that sloped downwards, but otherwise went straight to an elevator, and you bring the elevator up and you're at the top of the ramp, even though the elevator was just taking you straight up.
Another example was a secret level which was shaped like this (warning, ASCII art):
Yeah, my ASCII art sucks. Anyway, like that -- square/donut shaped -- only bigger. The inner room was huge, the outer hallway was narrow, and in each of the four cardinal directions, there was an open doorway between them. Only the inner room was a completely different room depending on which door you were going through.
In other words, because of the way Duke Nukem fakes 3D, you can think of it as if the outer hallway was a spiral ramp going down, and the four versions of the inner room were actually stacked on top of each other. It functioned that way except for one thing: the hallway was not sloped, and the inner rooms actually took up the same physical space.
Hard to explain, really.
Then, just for fun, they added these tubes in the middle room. Each tube was an invisible teleporter (obvious if you were looking for it) that would make you appear at the top of another room -- so basically, each room had a tube that lead downwards to each of the other rooms. And it was certainly conceivable that you could have that feedback loop of falling into the same teleporter repeatedly.
Anyway, I realize this is new and very cool, especially to put it in the hands of the user. But portal technology is not actually that new -- in fact, it's quite old, almost as old as BSP itself. It usually doesn't work well except for wholly indoor environments, but it's certainly nice with a mix of other methods, so you can use the portals for things octrees simply can't do. If they're doing it right, though, the doorways in that game are possibly nothing but portals also, meaning it should be possible to walk through a doorway into a room and suddenly find yourself falling forwards...
Mod for Prey allows this (Score:2, Informative)
Re:A DigiPen Game (Score:3, Informative)
so a situation where an "input" exists without an output does not occur.
you should also note that the video displays traditional hl2 "grav gun" functionality too, so it's probably like this: primary: make in/out portals, secondary: grip/release with grav gun (or switched)
That's not a portal. (Score:4, Informative)
Portals are much cooler because it's not like you're looking through a portal or a teleporter -- a portal really is just a hole in the wall that happens to lead to another part of the map. You've probably played plenty of games with Portal without realizing it, because it's usually used for occlusion culling for indoor geometry.
It basically means your game geometry is a linked list, only more complex... like hyperlinks...
Nevermind, let me try and translate. Say you have three rooms in an L shape. If you're in the first room, looking into the second, but you can't see the entrance to the third room, then the game can skip drawing the entire third room. It can break the second room down, also -- you could have a portal in the middle of the room, so that half the room can just be ignored if it knows you can't see the portal to that half of the room.
They also have the nifty ability to do crazy stuff like this, because the portal between two rooms is really only a pointer between them, in the literal, programming sense.
So, this implementation may be the most polished user-modifiable portals you've seen, but you've probably seen plenty of very polished portals that you never knew were there. That, and the UT thing you mentioned isn't really portals...
Did NOBODY play Descent? (Score:3, Informative)
Slashdotted (Score:3, Informative)
Link [google.com]
Re:Original... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:A DigiPen Game (Score:2, Informative)