Now You're Thinking With Portals

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.

I think my brain just snapped

[twistedsymphony]

Wow, I've played through Prey and the portals in that game really mess with your mind but being able to create portals at will certainly makes for some messed up stuff. Reminds me of the black circles they used to have in old cartoons were they'd just throw it in the ground or onto a wall and walk through.

I'm curious how they plan to let you get yourself out of an infinite portal loop like a portal in the floor the drops from the ceiling back into the portal in the floor. etc. unless of course said portals are only good for X number of uses. Even still This one looks to be much cooler then the gravity gun.

Re:Narbacular Drop

[webrunner]

The thing people need to realise is that:
- In Prey, portals are a new thing that level can do to the player
- In Narbtacular Drop and Portal, portals are a new thing that the player can do to the level.

Even older than Prey...

[Pfhorrest]

Bungie's Marathon series used a portals-based (though still "2.5D") engine way back in the day, and there were plenty of maps which used made use of what we called "5D space" (two different rooms occupying the same 3D space at the same time, yet not actually being the same room). I know this isn't precisely what the article is talking about, but it's still an application of portals technology for the purposes of interesting gameplay. One of the maps that shipped with the first game was even called "5D space", and was basically a maze that folded around and intersected itself. You could run around a 270-degree curve of hallway on level ground and not intersect the same bit of hallway you were travelling down before you hit the curve...

Re:A DigiPen Game

[The MAZZTer]

I just played that game. It's the same general idea as Portal will use, so it's fun to play around with the physics and all before the game comes out.

One fun thing to do is shoot a blue portal in the ceiling, a red one in the floor, and then fall though in an infinite loop thing... and then as you fall shoot a blue portal in a wall, you go flying out like in the Portal trailer. I used it to get over a lava pit (I think it might have not been the correct solution, but it was fun. :)

Limits

[Kaenneth]

I wonder how many portals the source engine can handle, each portal is a new point of view to render from.

If there was multiplayer, imagine a wall with 16 portals on it, the other side overlooking the 16 portals again... from 16 different angles...

But you can go weirder!

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

Portal technology allows you to join arbitrary regions of space so that light travels from one to the other, So here's a room divided into 4 quadrants: +-------+
+.A...B.+
+.......+
+.C...D.+
+-------+
Go east from A, say, and you get to B. With portal technology you can throw away D and join the south edge of B to the east edge of C. The next result: you walk 270 degrees around the room and you end up back where you started! This is essentially what physicists mean by a curved spacetime. In this case the spacetime is "piecewise" linear with all of the curvature concentrated at the center of the room. And when you join regions with portals you can potentially use any affine transform you like. For example you could have a ring corridor with the property that when you walk around it once you are half the size you were when you started. You might see yourself half size (or twice as large) if you look far enough. This is similar to the way a mathematician might build a manifold using 'charts' and 'atlases'. (A non-orientable manifold would be one where walking through a certain door reflected you, or the universe, depending on your point of view.)

(Note, I don't mean that there are 3 rooms, A, B and C. I mean one big room with 3 regions, and maybe a thin pillar in the center. It would look like an ordinary room until you dropped some objects and started walking around it. And of course it would get very tricky to deal with someone in one of the other regions shooting at you. You'd see them in multiple directions.)

You can even do weirder things like make portals work in spacetime...

Re:Cool!

[KIFulgore]

Kudos to Valve for taking a trip over to Digipen's career day and nabbing the whole Narbacular Drop team ;). I was a DP student when they were working on Narb, my head still hurts when I think of the difficulty level of the puzzles you can create with it. I believe in their demo they had to nerf the difficulty several times for us mere mortals.

doubt it

[JeanBaptiste]

double the development time, double the support issues for an additional one percent in sales. just isn't worth it. yeah you can re-use much of it from one platform to the next, but you also have OS specific problems with each.

I don't know why they don't put games on boot disks, whatever OS they want to use. Would solve a lot of the problems that normal end users have with bad performance due to viruses and spyware, plus the game developers would likely use a linux based system. no compatibility issues, no install issues, no software conflict issues, seems they'd save a bunch on support

but what do i know. (goes back to writing SQL queries)

Offtopic: Steam

[ewhac]

Now why did you feel the need to tell us all?

This is off-topic. But since you asked...

I feel it's important to remind people that, no matter how slick the packaging or magnificent the graphics or interesting/useful the application, this piece of software comes with an enormous downside: You have to install spyware in order to play it.

Ordinarily, that would be the end of the discussion:

"Hey, check out these really slick animated cursors!"
"Dude, it's spyware."
"Hey, isn't my new screen buddy cute?"
"Dude, it's spyware."
"Woah, look at this uber-cool screensaver I installed!"
"Dude, it's spyware."
"Wow, this free solitaire program I downloaded is much prettier than the one that comes with Windows."
"Dude, it's spyware!"

If a vendor distributes spyware, they are correctly pilloried by the community. Yet, for some reason, Valve gets a pass. No one has been able to make the argument that distinguishes Steam from other spyware suites out there. And no, claiming that Valve is trying to develop a new revenue model doesn't cut it, because Gator and BonziBuddy and CometCursor were also trying to develop a new revenue model.

Anti-cheat measures? A reasonable feature, but PunkBuster did the same thing with Quake3 without being a requirement.

If I seem just a bit more strident about this than most, it's because I'm still annoyed at Valve for breaking my copy of HalfLife. I had a perfectly working copy of HalfLife -- in fact, two copies, because I'd bought a second copy bundled with Counter-Strike because I didn't feel like spending hours downloading it -- when one day Valve announces Steam. I said, "No, thank you, Steam's 'features' are not valuable to me, and certainly not worth as much as what I'll lose in personal privacy and system stability. My copy of HalfLife works just fine the way it is." I made an economic decision; I voted with my wallet. That's what everyone here says to do, right?

Well, that wasn't good enough for Valve, who apparently threatened or bought off the GameSpy3D and All-Seeing Eye publishers into refusing to list non-Steam game servers (of which there were plenty), and shutting off the old authentication servers. In other words, they broke my copy of HalfLife to try and force me to install their spyware. I have stuck to my principles, and continue to refuse to install Steam. This means I don't get to play TFC or Counter-Strike any more, despite the fact that there's nothing, technically, wrong with the copies I own. A considerable fraction of the value in the software I bought and paid for has been destroyed.

Valve tried to change the terms of the sale in a big fscking way long after the fact. If they did it once, there's every reason to suspect they'll do it again. Sorry, you don't get to do that, not with my machine and not with my dollars. I feel it's still important to make people aware that the cost to them may well be far greater than simply the dollars they'll part with.

Schwab

P.S: If anyone knows of any master servers listing non-Steam TFC and Counter-Strike servers that will work with the old WON-based versions of HalfLife, I'd appreciate knowing about it.

Re:Portal progression

[grumbel]

### 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.

Most simple solution would be to link the portal to itself, so if you go in, you come out at the exact same spot, just the other way around. Even more funny would be to make the portal like a mirror, so if you go in you come out in a world that is a mirrored version of the one you left. 'The Room' demo that was shown on GDC a while back did fun stuff like that, it had scale-portals, throw a small object through one portal and it will come out enlarged of another portal.

Re:Offtopic: Steam

[nuclearpenguins]

I own a LAN-gaming center and have to pay Valve one set fee per year, but I get every game they make over Steam on every computer at my store. It works flawlessly for me.

Re:I think my brain just snapped

[Vo0k]

Create an exit portal leading up and an entrance one in the ceiling. Tricky (timing) but possible. Again law of conservation of energy is violated but in opposite direction. Or trivial if the game ignores damage of hitting the ceiling - most games cause fall damage if you actually -fall- but hitting the ceilings at huge speeds (or grabbing ladders while falling really fast or such) doesn't cause any damage. Anyway, given enough room you can do wonders about losing speed.

More interesting would be to create an infinite loop and fill it with rockets. Lots of rockets flying in straight line continuously. Then reopen the exit portal in front of an enemy.

Re:Portal progression

[Anonymous Coward]

"Narbacular Drop, upon which Portals was based, won't allow you through one portal until the second has been placed."

For the first portal, I don't think this will either (it remains purple and swirly as far as I can tell), but what about the 3rd? 5th? etc (yes you can only ever place two, but if portals are made in pairs...). In the video, they're still accessible, but they appear to differ in action depending on which of the portals you go through, although these differences could be contributed to something entirely different.

Which then leaves the question. If you make three portals to get through one part of the puzzle (like the bit in the vid with the rising and falling staircase), are you able to walk through a 4th one if you make it on a different part of the level? How does a 5th one break the pairing?

Or, maybe they're just not made in pairs...