Portal 2's The Perpetual Testing Initiative

Look at the monitors for some eastereggs, lika a bit from meet the pyro nd somethig censored

The good news is that I've heard that these chambers will be modifiable in hammer, which means that you can make dirt cheap prototypes in this tool and once the layout is finalised you can open the level in hammer and do some finetuning. Too bad the layouts for my portal 2 campaign are already done and I will have no use for this tool.

Even without the option to continue working in hammer, this is an impressive tool and it will probably allow for some great new content.

There was a video showing the whole process including workshop integration and taking the map into hammer but I think it got taken down.

It looks fantastic. It looks like you'll be able to build a fully working chamber (provided you already have a plan) in about 10 minutes. It was very quick jumping back and forth between the editor (which isn't a stand-alone application btw it runs straight from portal 2) and playing it. Then once he was finished there was a publish to friends only or everyone option on the workshop (as well as a local save option of course).

When he downloaded some from the workshop (again, ingame) it took a few moments and then he could play it straight away and as soon as it finished it asked him to rate it, so the good chambers should have absolutely no problems filtering to the top of the workshop.

All in all it looked like a mind blowingly useful tool. It adds perpetual replay value to portal 2, it allows people who have zero concept of level design, hammer or anything technical to create stunning and professional looking test chambers and it allows those who know how to use hammer already a way to prototype levels in literally minutes before being able to do an art-pass or assemble them into a multi-map pack.

Looking for it, because I'm a very bad puzzle designer and scripter so I hope this will help me to do a Portal map like I tried a few years ago

That's the one. Someone told me it had been taken down though, never checked for a re-host.

Bravo, Valve. Bravo. Nice to see them supporting the community in ways other pubs just can't even imagine.

This is so awesome, Valve can do no wrong!

I was able to play with this quite extensively... its extremely impressive, how intuitive they implemented it and easy it is to use. we're using their implementation of steam workshop for how we're going to implement it in nexuiz... not the level editor tho of course

Quote from Kedhrin

I was able to play with this quite extensively... its extremely impressive, how intuitive they implemented it and easy it is to use. we're using their implementation of steam workshop for how we're going to implement it in nexuiz... not the level editor tho of course

Will nexuiz(pc version) have a level editor?

Quote from neozyem

Will nexuiz(pc version) have a level editor?

thats the plan, we are going through some issues to make sure the CryENGINE 3 free SDK can't open nexuiz maps, and our editor can't open other versions of the engine either. (right now the free cryengine sdk can open up all of our stuff for the most part). You'd think it'd be an easy fix to watermark the files... but it's turning into hot water. We're working closely with crytek to hopefully get it in. I wanna do a bunch of tutorials too

Valve gave out a couple of Beta accesses to the Editor. It seems to be really awesome, although to make something stand out visually I guess you'll still have to go through Hammer.

Kedhrin: Great to hear about the Steamworkshop. This is gonna be awesome

yeah valve wants devs to get on steam workshop, so they gave me a beta key to look at how they were doing it in portal 2. i don't see why devs with an editor wouldn't want to. its an awesome platform.

no more going through external websites and such to get your maps out there, hoping players see them... makes me happy to think of

so let me get this straight this thing will spit out *.bsps ? with lightmaps and all precalculation already done ?

yeah theres some sort of compiling that it does do, its a REALLY fast compiler... so either they drastically sped things up or figured out a way to pre-produce its final quality.

watching the latest video it produces pretty nasty lighting tbh

Yeah it compiles it but his test chamber is ultra small and the bulk of the interest in his lighting is from the projected texture so it's not surprising it only takes a few seconds.

Didn't it rebuild the map when it was being published? That's probably a final compile with the others being fast or 'normal'.