The Portal thread

[Rsandee]

Valve'd better be working on Half-Life 3 damnit.

[PluMGMK]

Wasn't that confirmed to be cancelled?

[Rsandee]

Wasn't that confirmed to be cancelled?

No official statement has ever been given, all supposed "leaks" and "announcements" were made by people that left Valve.

[Serza5]

Valve'd better be working on Half-Life 3 damnit.

Valve on the game front only seem to be focused on vr tech demos like that portal-esque one. Going this long without any big release title I would roll my eyes at any sudden claim they do have interest unless have something to deliver. It doesn't help that there has been reports of programmers leaving Valve for that reason.

[Rsandee]

Valve'd better be working on Half-Life 3 damnit.

Valve on the game front only seem to be focused on vr tech demos like that portal-esque one. Going this long without any big release title I would roll my eyes at any sudden claim they do have interest unless have something to deliver. It doesn't help that there has been reports of programmers leaving Valve for that reason.

The official narrative is that "the technology isn't there yet" and that they're waiting for some revolutionary gaming tech.

[Aaron]

Portal 2 is my favourite Portal game!
By the way, speaking of Portal, here's this cool moving GLaDOS lamp that you can control by making a remote shown on the website.
See the instructions on the Instructables page:
http://www.instructables.com/id/A-fully ... ng-arm-la/

Get the 3D part files (including remote):
http://ytec3d.com/glados-lamp/

WARNING:
Before you do anything, just make sure you don't do this in the evening, cause you're not gonna be able to finish it that shortly. Plus, you're going to feel tired. Making only the lamp itself takes MONTHS!

[Master]

That Bridge Constructor Portal game is now out on Steam, I didn't even know it came out until Hoodcom told me. You can find it here.

[Rycer]

I'm pretty dissapointed there's still no Portal 3 nor HL3. Instead we get a Portal-themed Bridge Contructor game.
Sigh. At least we get something. The same cannot be said about HL3 :/

[Ambidextroid]

I’m pretty sure all hope for HL3 has been lost since the posting of its plot online, but I still have my hopes up for Portal

[Birds858]

Bump.

Valve make a VR demo called Moondust based on Portal for testing the Knuckles EV2 controllers. There also a Half-Life references in the demo.

[PluMGMK]

Isn't this the same guy who said "Valve loves us" a few years ago in a video rebuking someone who said HL3 would never be released? I somewhat appreciate the irony.

[Birds858]

Isn't this the same guy who said "Valve loves us" a few years ago in a video rebuking someone who said HL3 would never be released? I somewhat appreciate the irony.

Well yes.
https://www.reddit.com/r/HalfLife/comme ... s_network/

[PluMGMK]

Ah yes, "Half-Life 3 WILL release, here's why". That's the one. Poor guy.

[Birds858]

Actually, Half Life 3 was released in 2017.
http://www.marclaidlaw.com/epistle-3/
With some bonus levels also.
https://www.moddb.com/mods/hl2aftermath

[PluMGMK]

I was aware of Epistle 3 all right. I finally heard a summary in that video I posted in the HL3 thread a while back, but I still haven't been able to bring myself to read the thing itself… I wasn't aware of that mod though, I should check it out…

[PluMGMK]

BUMP!

Anyone here still play the Portal games? I just finished a playthrough of the Portal 2 singleplayer campaign today, for the first time in quite a while. I must say, the ending never fails to make me well up… Also, since I stopped playing to go to bed last night during Chapter 6, I got to experience the PotatOS Lament menu screen. After eleven years, and some time spent learning Latin… I have to say it's just as unsettling and incomprehensible as it ever was! I know, there's an unofficial transcription / translation that's been doing the rounds for much of that time (it's in the description of the video I linked) but I'm nowhere near convinced of its accuracy…

I'd forgotten just how intriguing the journey through the underground bits really was. You're basically watching the history of the place unfolding, even while using your portalgun to get around all the dilapidation, but all the locked doors and sealed-off bits clearly show you that there was orders of magnitude more stuff going on than the bits you see.

Still, certain bits of it leave a bad taste in my mouth… Little things… Things I could be told I'm nitpicky over… Like the way they apparently had portals going back to the fifties, even though the first game gave the impression they were a more recent innovation. OK, that's a retcon, not so bad… But, much more glaringly, there's the fact that you're going through "Science spheres" built from the 50s to the 80s, and then suddenly everything changes drastically in the 90s, and the notice you pass on your way back up states that the entire underground section was sealed in 1961 – which clearly isn't true because the bit you were just in dates from the 80s!

At that point (if you notice these things, which in fairness are easily missable), you're left wondering how much of what you've seen can actually be trusted, and how much is just more lies (since GLaDOS and Wheatley fill you with their crooked words all the time you're in the modern section). At that point, it starts to remind me of Rayman Origins (gasp!) – just as in Rayman one can say "everything's just a dream", in Portal one can say "it's all lies" – and I'm not satisfied with either of those conclusions. Of course, Portal 2 later introduced the Multiverse, which made it even easier to wave off the contradictions, and even harder to keep an interest in the history, since apparently there are now infinitely many different histories…

There's also the whole Caroline-GLaDOS thing – in the commentary they actually say that because they used the same actress for the two characters, initially as a shortcut, they got this idea for an "origin story"… I don't see why an "origin story" was needed in the first place, and I don't believe I'm the only one who felt that way. Again, it reminds me of Rayman Origins, with the Magician thing – while obviously the Caroline-GLaDOS thing in Portal was much better executed than the Magician thing in Rayman, they both feel like something we could have done without…

Oh shoot, that looks like a rant, doesn't it? Welp, I still love Portal 2. And I still like Rayman Origins too. I guess if the developers had gone a little bit easier on the intrigue in each case, they could have wound up being more interesting overall. And they still can be really interesting if you overlook certain inconsistencies!

[Kiza/Raybox]

I still play Portal series, yes! It's been a while this reply's been posted, I see.
I completed Portal 3-4 times with different year stamps and this year turned out to be the first to complete licenced Portal (others were in pirated copy).
At first it was hard, but a while later you just realize it was actually easy!

[PluMGMK]

So "Portal 2: Community Edition" finally entered open beta last Friday, and is available to anyone who owns Portal 2 on Steam. It's basically a souped-up modder-friendly version of the game, with the engine and all the tools modernized by members of the community (rather than Valve themselves), hence the name. For the first time, it allows easily bringing stuff from other Source games (like HL2 and the original Portal) into Portal 2 mods, which is something that I was really hoping would be possible back when the original Portal 2 SDK released in 2011. I reckon it's too late for me now though, where on earth am I going to get the time and energy to get back into Source engine modding at this stage of my life?

Anyway, given that I had wishlisted it, I did of course download it anyway, and used it to play through the Portal 2 singleplayer campaign last Sunday, which was the 15th anniversary of the game's original release (at least in this timezone!). Despite the warnings about it being beta-quality software, I was able to get through the single-player campaign without encountering any issues until I got close to the end of Chapter 8. At that point, for some reason the map loading process started somehow locking up my entire machine (not sure how that's even possible… ), so I set Steam to launch the Windows version via Proton instead of the native Linux port, and then there were no further issues!