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Now You're Thinking With Portals
Posted by
Zonk
on Wed Jul 19, 2006 02:10 PM
from the if-at-first-you-don't-succeed-you-fail dept.
from the if-at-first-you-don't-succeed-you-fail dept.
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.
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Valve Opens The Portal 61 comments
Via Joystiq, an IGN story giving some background on the Portal project, the interesting FPS/Puzzler that Valve has planned to go out with Half-Life 2: Episode 2. The article interviews the team behind the technology, and gives some insight on what it must be like to have the best senior year of college ever: "Along with the other members of the Portal team, we were students at DigiPen Institute of Technology located in Redmond, WA, next to the Nintendo of America campus. During our senior year, the seven of us created a game called Narbacular Drop, which was an early test of our ideas about portal-based gameplay. Every year, DigiPen puts on an expo for graduating seniors to show their game projects to prospective employers. A couple of Valve people attended, and they asked us to come to the Valve offices and show it to Gabe Newell. Gabe watched our demo and basically hired us on the spot. It was kind of shocking. We stood around in the parking lot afterwards gibbering to ourselves for about 20 minutes."
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A DigiPen Game (Score:5, Informative)
Re:A DigiPen Game (Score:4, Interesting)
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. :)
Parent
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)
Re:Bandwidth Limit Exceeded (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Bandwidth Limit Exceeded (Score:3, 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:Narbacular Drop (Score:2)
And besides, I'd rather have good ideas taken wherever they may go. The danger of course is to lose the thing ABOUT the feature that made it good in the "original," but as this seems to be only enhancing the possibilities, I say "go for it Valve."
Re:Narbacular Drop (Score:2)
Read the wiki article [wikipedia.org] on Prey. It's been in development since 1995. (!) I remember the original PC Gamer spread which discussed all the cool features that portal technology would allow. As it worked out, however, the technology was a bit too complex and was shelved. A new version was later created with a different codebase and released in 2006.
So I think that it's hard NOT to say that Portal was influenced
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.
Parent
One feature makes it a ripoff? (Score:2)
Both games are 3D FPSs with portals whose names start with P.
What about the differences?
Prey: spirit walking, gravity manipulation, Native American protagonist, "living" level design.
Portal: at-will portal creation, portals don't have to share horizontal/vertical orientation, "futuristic" level design.
This isn't including the assumptions one could make about the gameplay: knowing Valve, the player character will be silent, where the Prey prot
The Middle Ground (Score:3, Funny)
Heck ya! Native american protagonist. Spirit mode. Futuristic levels. Lot's of portals. What more could you want?
OT (Score:2)
Re:One feature makes it a ripoff? (Score:2)
What do you mean "share horizontal/vertical orientation"? There are rooms in Prey where a portal takes you onto a wall in the same room, or drops you through a ceiling in another room, etc., meaning your orientation shifts as you walk through it.
Must have missed them. (Score:2)
Re:Narbacular Drop (Score:3, Interesting)
- 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.
Re:Narbacular Drop (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Narbacular Drop (Score:3, Informative)
Doom 3 physics:half life 2 physics::Prey portals:Portal portals
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
Re:Narbacular Drop (Score:2)
I think my brain just snapped (Score:3, Interesting)
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:I think my brain just snapped (Score:2)
Looking at the video on their page it seems they'll allow it just fine. This game looks very nifty!
Re:I think my brain just snapped (Score:2)
If it were up to me the solution would be single-player: You can still access the menus, load from your last save. multi-player: Have a timeout period on multiple uses where you are blocked by the portal's surface instead of going through it.
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:I think my brain just snapped (Score:2)
From the video it looks like infinite loop portals would be allowed. To get out you'd just shoot to make a new portal on the wall next to you. This would change the location of one of the two portals breaking the loop.
Re:I think my brain just snapped (Score:2)
Re:I think my brain just snapped (Score:3, Interesting)
More interesting would be to create a
Re:I think my brain just snapped (Score:2)
Simple. Fire off another portal to the side while you're falling through that loop. You'll fall through the portal one more time, then you'll pop out of the new one, hopefully away from the hole.
What would really be a gas would be fake portals that pass light but not matter. Fire a real portal over a fake one, run through. Remo
Re:I think my brain just snapped (Score:2)
Meep, meep! (Score:4, Insightful)
Gameplay (Score:5, Insightful)
Its all in the gameplay!
Even older than Prey... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Even older than Prey... (Score:2)
I'll buy it, but not for Windoze (Score:2, Insightful)
Limits (Score:5, Interesting)
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! (Score:4, Interesting)
+.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:But you can go weirder! (Score:2)
And trying to understand Relativity definitely makes me want to just pick up a videogame...
Backdoor in game let's you win immediately. (Score:4, Funny)
Did NOBODY play Descent? (Score:3, Informative)
Slashdotted (Score:3, Informative)
Link [google.com]
Re:Original... (Score:2)
Re:Original... (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Original... (Score:2)
It's not as if Prey is the first game to have a portal mechanism either. This thread is full of examples to the contrary. However the common reaction is to think Portal is a Prey ripoff, mearly because Prey contains the most recent incartation of a vaugly simmilar concept. In reality, there isn't much basis for comparing the two games, and such comparisons would be of limited usefulness.
Re:Original... (Score:2, Insightful)
Reading the description that was the first thing to pop in my mind too. But after seeing the video and some of the test they will put the player though, I think it will definately be able to set itself apart from Prey, think more puzzle and less FPS.
Except (Score:2)
Re:Valve, Huh? (Score:2)
Offtopic: Steam (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re:Offtopic: Steam (Score:4, Insightful)
No, they decided to stop offering the service you were used to getting for free, and replace it with a different service (also free).
I actually like Steam, because unlike other forms of spyware or DRM (both of which are evil), Steam actually stays 100% out of my way, without significantly changing the model for my owning a game.
Let's compare Steam to other copy protection models:
CD Keys. Don't work, easily broken by "borrowing" a friend's key and denying access to the game's authentication servers.
Requiring the CD to be inserted. This is either ludicrously easy to beat (create another virtual drive in Wine, change some registry values, or put a snigle file on a single Samba share in Windows) or insanely annoying, or both. In any case, it prevents backups, and it shortens the life of the original CD, assuming it works.
Making the game a service (MMO). Great, so I pay $50 or $60 for the game, then you want me to spend $15 a month to keep playing? Not usually worth it, and only works for MMOs.
Steam. Well, it may be a steaming pile of crap technologically (IE all over), but it means that once I pay for a game, I've paid for it. I can then play said game from any computer that I remember my Steam password on, and every time I play it, I get to download and install the software. It also automatically provides me updates in a fairly unobtrusive way (something I've never had another game do), and not only allows me to play the game without a CD, not only allows me to download any number of times, but actually provides me with a tool to back up a copy of any number of Steam games to a CD or DVD, in a way that's account neutral -- which means if my friend buys Half-Life 2, I can burn a CD of the game and give it to him, saving him from waiting for the download.
It's even been good about asking before it sends info in. A hardware survey, for instance. Whereas these other pieces of spyware tend to collect personal info, send it in, silently eat up resources in the background with no explanation as to why, and cannot be shut off effectively.
I mean, yes, by some definition, it's Spyware, but by the same definition, so is Windows. Your copy of Windows would be very, very broken if you didn't get your automatic updates.
Anyway, end of rant, but I really get sick of all the hatred against Steam every time it comes up. You want an argument that distinguishes Steam from these other things? Steam actually adds value. Most spyware generally does nothing for you, steals your resources, pops up messages, and sends spam. Steam does none of these things, but lets you do things (legally!) that no other game or game platform lets you do at all.
Parent
Re:Cool! (Score:2, Interesting)
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...
Parent
Re:Portal progression (Score:3, Interesting)
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