Have we really got that far?

Quote from Bic-B@ll

if someone told me about this stuff a month ago i would have called them for bullshit quite strongly, i would have never believed that the half life engine was able to dynamically let you see into other areas of the map, let alone see players. id say its quite surprising that its part of the engine, maybe they added a whole lot of code to the engine that will let developers do even more crazy stuff with mods. Who cares if its a leap ahead or not in games.

I don't think its that difficult to implent actually:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDpiSfvU ... ch=portals

download: http://www.garrysmod.org/downloads/view/dl/800/

Quote from Mazy

Heh, I stand corrected. Could've sworn that Unreal didn't have that kind of tech, and I really dont remember that in the singleplayer or multiplayer portions of the original Unreal. Was it something they had in the engine but wasnt used until later on by the community, which would explain why I never saw it?Anyway, I'm fairly certain the maps that came with UT didn't have this kind of stuff, otherwise I'd have noticed

/me hides

Maps that came with Unreal 1 even had it. UT itself didnt made a lot of use of it but it was used sometimes. DM Fractal for example. If you step in to the pit in the middle you end up on the ceiling of the room and fall down.

Unreal 1 had a multiplay level that had it, in a castle. Forgot its damn name.

And as mentioned before certain singleplay areas like after you fought the queen you walk trough a portal without noticing it. I guess they didnt manage to fit the corridor in anymore and thus placed it somewhere else.

Well, of course portals as technology isn't new to FPSs, as everyone here should know.

But yeah... it's intergrating it into gameplay that's Valve's strong suit.

Like they did with physics in HL2... heck, even GoldenEye had basic physics back in 1997 (shoot a mounted screen, shoot a crate/chair/etc) but it was the way Valve did it that was so ®evolutionary.

I like the look of Portal, though... looks like something that would be monotonous and boring for 12 hours, but for a small game bundled with Episode 2; it's a great idea. And it kinda reminds me of The Cube, which is cool.

Quoting myself from the other Portal thread... yeah I know it's cheesy, but I don't want to type a bunch all over again.

Yes Unreal1 did have portals, though I think very few were actually used in the game itself. Portal in Unreal mainly took off when UT99 was released and people started making custom maps.

The only thing Valve is really doing new with portals is allowing the player to place them anywhere by shooting a gun, therefore making them a gameplay gimmick that is used to solve interesting puzzles. I wouldn't say it's "revolutionary", as Valve certainly wasn't the first to use portals, but I would say it's neat and does look very fun.

To me, "revolutionary" is when a game brings something to the genre that all other games can now take advantage of. Like the first time you ever saw realistic physics (no, it wasn't HL2, though Valve's implementation was top-notch and allowed you to play with it), or dynamic lighting, or a new level of narrative. Shoot, most "new ideas" you see in games were thought about years before but we didn't have the hardware power to implement them correctly.

Valve is taking some known ideas and making very good use of them; physics and portals, and basically just raising the bar a little bit higher. I'd call it "evolutionary".

Quote from TomWithTheWeather

Seeing as how you can probably place your portals anywhere, my guess is that it's not a VIS thing at all, but some render-to-texture type stuff. This way, there is no need to alter BSP/walls/geometry in realtime. Notice in the video how when you place the first portal, you can't see through it until you place the second. The second acts like a camera that shows what the first one sees, and probably the other way around once you get the second placed.

It's probably no different than realtime video screens/cameras that you've seen in many different games, except you can now walk through them.

Shoot, Prey probably does it the same exact way.

Quote from Mazy

Heh, I stand corrected. Could've sworn that Unreal didn't have that kind of tech, and I really dont remember that in the singleplayer or multiplayer portions of the original Unreal. Was it something they had in the engine but wasnt used until later on by the community, which would explain why I never saw it?Anyway, I'm fairly certain the maps that came with UT didn't have this kind of stuff, otherwise I'd have noticed

It was used in singleplayer a bit. I think it was mostly used by the community though, I can remember an Escher-style map and it had portals all around it , it was used a lot in custom maps.

And it was in UT, although not very noticable. Dm Fractal (the map Warbeast meant):

[Blocked Image: http://www.snipamasta.co.uk/files/Weeee.jpg]

You fall through the floor (if someone shoots the triggers around it) and end up on the ceiling and fall into the electric beams and your body explodes and falls all over the map.

Hourences, I completely forgot about that. It's called Elsinore (I think that's how it was spelt).

Ah okay, I was thinking it were some real attention seeking areas which were near impossible to miss (You know, having a big portal standing in the middle of a room that lead somewhere, with nothing behind it), but now I see that its not on that huge a scale. Anyway, with Fractal its pretty obvious that they got some portals going, but its ages since I tried that one out and never really thought of the fact that you could watch the map going all the way down.