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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.
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.
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.
If what you are reading sounds funny, or sarcastic, lame, or stupid
it is because it is supposed to be. just laugh
Reminds me of the ACME portable holes they used to have in the old Road Runner cartoons :-)
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
its nice to see that some people are still working to improve gameplay with innovative ideas instead of just focusing on technological details (such as how exact and good looking the shadows are).
Its all in the gameplay!
If forums teach us anything, it is that logic and critical thinking should be required courses in the public schools.
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...
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
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...
+.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...
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
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.
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
If you just turn around and shot the wall, you can travel to the final level immediately. What a rip off.
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...
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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