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.

Comments

A DigiPen Game

[rizzuh]

Portal is based on a game called Narbacular Drop that was developed by a group of seniors at the DigiPen Institute of Technology. Valve ended up contracting the entire programming team to work on Portal. It's interesting to see how a game school's relatively small-time project has become front-page news on dozens of gaming sites.

Narbacular Drop

[SB5]

This game is based off of "Narbacular Drop". The guy that made "Narbacular Drop" got hired to Valve, and went on to make this.

Lots of people keep calling it a "Prey" ripoff, whether his idea came from "Prey" or not, its a completely different game imho.

Re:Narbacular Drop

[AKAImBatman]

Prey had 10 years to show off their portal tech. They couldn't do it.

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), creating those effects follows quite easily.

So again, it's impossible to say that Portal and its predecessor were not influenced by Prey.

That's not a portal.

[SanityInAnarchy]

That's just your average teleportation device. Another example is the normal teleporters that are all over your average Quake/Doom/Unreal map. Basically, you activate it and it moves you.

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...

Slashdotted

[Anonymous Coward]

I couldn't load the video referenced in the article, but I found this on Google Video (which I think is the same video). It looks pretty sweet.

Link