The new Portal 2 PTI has been announced officially. We knew it was coming for some time but I never thought that it would be just as awesome as it will be.

The editor is so intuitive that literally anyone who can play Portal will be able to use it. The upside of this is there will be thousands of new test chambers to play in no time at all. The downside of this is barely a downside: There will only be the one clean, crisp, Aperture style of test chambers, no broken chambers falling to pieces, no 1960′s Aperture. Not even any co-op maps to begin with. Though with every single player able to design their own professionally quality test chambers in a matter of minutes, I’m not going to complain.

For those who already know Source level design well, this tool will be an enormous time saver. Prototyping levels in minutes instead of hours (or even days) then being able to take the level into hammer and spruce it up (or tear it to pieces!).

I’m not sure I’ll be using it much myself as I want to move away from mapping for Source all together to explore other engines but it’s an incredibly exciting tool that has probably just quadrupled the lifespan of Portal 2 as a ‘current’ game.

What do you think about the PTI? Are you worried the Steam Workshop will be flooded with mediocre maps? Are you excited that we will have a universal platform for finding truly amazing test chambers?

Disclaimer: the first part of this was written months and months ago in a fit of rage:

Disclaimer 2: Spoilers follow:

So due to Eidos’ frankly terrible game design, I have a choice between continuing (and failing) to attempt to kill this third boss and eventually gouging out my eyes and recreating a scene from Event Horizon, or restarting the game and playing the last 15+ hours from the start because my save pair only extends back an hour (a length of time that in most games, is enough to save from any fatal mistake)

Little did I know there’d be a choice four hours before the consequences that screw you over. Four hours… Really Eidos? You really want to separate a choice with it’s consequences by four hours of gameplay so that any chance of reloading a save to make the other choice is gone?

Penny Arcade have summed it up nicely (Link to that)
The bosses in Deus Ex can all tank well over fifty direct shots to the chest, on top of that, the only way to tackle them is pretty much a head on fire fight with minimal cover and absolutely zero stealthing options. Which makes them like a completely separate game.

Through out the entire game I’ve been outfitting myself for stealth, playing how I enjoy it, and the game has actually been rewarding me for it, a lot. I get bonus points for making headshots, I get bonus points for non-lethal kils, the enemies don’t know where I made my shot from because I use a silencer on my pistol (other than the revolver, the only weapon I’d choose to use, but ammo is sparse) allowing me to get another few kills in before the guards have any clue where I am.

Playing stealthily is an amazingly rewarding and effective way to play the game. I never ever have to engage the enemy in a head on firefight, so I don’t have any of the damage reduction augs, or the typhoon (human-grenade) aug, or have any grenades stockpiled, so when it comes to the boss fights I find myself criminally underpowered.

Fortunately for me the first boss glitched out and stood still allowing me to pump shotgun shells into him whenever he was reloading.

Then the second boss was wiping the floor with me time after time until I realised I could just run in a circle around the room and as long as I kept up with her, she’d also run in a circle and never actually attack me. So I just shot her in the back (close range with a shotgun) but the 40 shots I had at the start of the fight weren’t enough: I had to break the cycle and grab some ammo from the side. If I’d dedicated more of my inventory to shotgun ammo, I could easily have killed her without taking any damage because of the poor design, Still though, 50 shots in the back when the rest of the game I’m taking out over a third of enemies with headshots is more than just a bit stupid.

I’m now at the third of these terrible boss fights and I’ve not found any glitches or exploitable patterns. Even if I had the typhoon aug or damage reduction augs they’d be no good here because of a choice I mistakenly made over four hours of play earlier. I have no augs to use. My vision is VERY blurred, I have no indication of how much ammo I have in my gun causing me to have a great opportunity to shoot but having to reload as soon as I start firing. I have no indication of what my health is. And on top of all this, the guy is a grenade-happy invisible man with some kind of plasma gun which deals one hit kills.

Currently I’ve spent the most frustrating 3+ hours trying to kill this guy, usually dying before I’ve got 20 clean shots in and he can probably tank 80 or more.

So I have two choices:

Replay the game from the very beginning and make sure to take the other choice, buy the typhoon aug and stock up on frag grenades.

Or continue to destroy my soul in this hopeless battle.

The fact that I haven’t included giving up on the game all together tells you how good the rest of the game is. If it was anything other than -excellent- I’d have given up on it. I’ve done that with several games in the past. The final (I assume) boss in GoW was after a long cut scene and with uninspiring game play and a poor story: what’s the point? Indiana Jones and the something or other on Wii. For some reason Indi is in a warehouse with Nazis climbing up ladders to get to him and the only way you can stop them is by bashing them off the ladders with a grand piano held by a crane. Cool huh? Well no. As soon as any Nazi gets to the top of a ladder (there are four) he shoots you and it’s game over. This would be fine if it weren’t for one simple fact: Indi has a gun. The inability to shoot back. The stupid and pointless limitation of not being able to shoot back (or pre-emptively) combined with the frustratingly fiddly piano controls got me very frustrated and I gave up (in fits of cursing).

I’d really like to get past this boss and finish the story, but having to start all over again remove so much motivation that I’ll probably have to wait well over a month before I can play again. Which makes me sad.

If the boss fights could be removed from Deus Ex: Human Revolution, I would easily go down as Game of the Year for me, however, they can’t. That relegates it to the worst experience in gaming I’ve had all year. (That’s saying something because I played the piss-poor Dead Space PC port this year. I imagine everyone at Visceral Games does their development actually using an Xbox, because there is no way they’ve ever used or probably even seen a mouse.)

– Everything that follows was written today after completing the game –

Now I’ve finished replaying all of Deus Ex on a harder difficulty setting, I made proper use of quicksaves, allowing my (now three) cyclic save method to extend back hours and hours. But with the hindsight I’d made the ‘correct’ choices anyway.

I can honestly say it’s been a lot more fun to play this time, especially as I decided to omit the boss fights by changing the difficulty down from hard to easy when they started and using the typhoon blast. It’s lovely this way.

Great game, great story, terrible ending, terrible boss fights. I highly recommend it, just make sure you’re aware of the totally out of place boss fights.

From the very first few days playing Team Fortress 2 I’d decided that tc_hydro was the coolest map. from never knowing where you’d be attacking to the cool industrial style, everything about it was fun for me. The general playerbase though, didn’t share my enthusiasm for it. Hydro quickly fell by the wayside of TF2′s ever growing pool of official maps and today barely manages to hold more players than the arena maps. Even OrangeX has more players!

Before TF2′s release, Valve seemed confident it would be quite popular so what went wrong? Well for one thing, it’s confusing. I see players all the time who have no idea how TC works, the concept is simple, I’ll let Robin explain: Robin explains TF2′s dynamic levels

Secondly, there is an issue with space, the map has to use it so carefully and it falls down here. The diagonal rounds go over and under each other and they’re incredibly tight corridors with no flanking options whatsoever unlike the other rounds which have two or three different routes between the points.

Just look how much there is going on in the middle there! (click to enlarge)

Thirdly Hydro is the reason people know TF2 has a stalemate activated sudden death mode. Though I believe the rounds that stalemate are the diagonal ones, the other rounds don’t usually seem to have anything like as much of a problem.

So the single route stages are what’s leaving a sour taste in people’s mouths. To combat this we need to design TC maps with better use of space. However getting the four middle points close enough to each other and still having enough space for two diagonal routes? No small feat! I tried out a few ways of merging the diagonal rounds so that they used the same space with no success, there just wasn’t enough space!

I’d given up hope of getting both diagonals in and planned to ditch them to make room for the other stages, allowing the map to be much smaller. When discussing the issue with TF2Maps.net chat, the idea of shifting the four mid stages slightly and only having one diagonal, or rather making half of the stages diagonal and one less total.

This is what it looked like. It looked promising and with just one single attempt I was able to build a map that could fit into this new layout. tc_strata is now progressing nicely, it has a few stalemates as any map where both teams are attacking at once will but at current are occurring in less than 5% of rounds.

Hopefully you can see there is a lot less going on in the middle and that there are actually two separate routes through from bottom left to top right. (click to enlarge)

Hopefully Strata will be finished by early autumn and if it is a success with the wider audience beta testing will bring it, I may even make another TC map, thought I’ll probably keep it small.

(Thanks to func_door for the image, I think)

TF2maps.net held a 72-hour competition, complete a map between 6PM on the 27th and 6PM on the 30th of June. I hunkered down and after 45 hours of work (an hour of that being testing with players) I emerged from my lair with an near-finished map.
I could simply leave it as it was, the gameplay is adequate and the level of detail is also just about up to standard. It would be a shame to leave it so close to being properly finished, so work continues.

Here’s a breakdown of what I spent my time doing:

• 1-8 – Blocking out layout, laying down the track, basic spawn entities
• Sleep
• 8-10 – Finishing up to first alpha level
• 11 – First test with bots
• 12-14 – Detailing Blu respawn room
• 15-20 – Detailing up to control point A and Red respawn
• 21 – First test with human players
• Sleep
• 22-24 – Finishing up detail around control point A
• 25 – Second test with human players
• 26-33 – Detailing the interior stretch between control points A and B
• 34-38 – Detailing between control point B and Red respawn
• 39 – Sealing and clipping
• 40 – Fixing leaks
• 41 – Lighting checks
• 42 – 3D skybox
• 43-44 – Final hours of tinkering
• 45 – Threw in satellite dish as a focal point, final compile, package, submit

I’m up to hour 52 now and ready for a proper public release. I honestly can’t believe that in just three days (did you notice I only slept twice?) I have a completely new map that didn’t have any planning or forethought. It shows me what I can do when the pressure is on.

The gallery of progress shots is available here on flickr

The main page will be updated shortly where you’ll be able to download pl_haste.

It feels to me like months have passed since I did anything remotely creative, all level design projects are on hold, I’ve done no modelling either for ages. But apparently it’s only been a month since I last updated this blog. Exam dread seems to make time stand still almost whilst the bliss of ignoring University and mapping sets the passage of time into overdrive. Still only 9 days left until exams are over and I can revert to my natural state of perpetual mapping, to finish tc_strata (It’s not dead!)

Oh, I did do one little bit of level design a few weekends ago, MapCore ran a small challenge, some of the entries were great and made me feel I hadn’t really put much thought into mine. The winners are here and you can download my entry here to run in HL2:EP2 or watch the really low quality (you’ve been warned) youtube video of the puzzle’s solution here.

I just need to buy a small blutooth or USB mouse and it will be perfection. It chews through battery life so it’s not really suited to heavy use out and about but on the train, at university at a friend’s house or even other rooms in my own house are perfect locations.

I can now take my level design with me when I leave my room and dropbox means I can sync files with my desktop without even thinking about it. The big advantage the slate has over a laptop is the pressure sensitive screen and digitizer so I can take lecture notes in my own handwriting, which is essential for a physics course. I’ve tried using MS Word’s equation builder and in a lecture where I might have to write over 100 equations, that’s just a joke.

I haven’t really begun to tap its potential, mostly I’ve been web browsing and watching House MD on it but Hammer is installed, as is Photoshop so once I get back after Easter, and back to work on tc_strata, I’ll really be having some fun with it.

Only thing to complain about is the battery life which is really short, otherwise it can do everything I could ever want it to.

More on the eee Slate to come…

Before I begin, this will contain spoilers so if you don’t want any stop reading and play Precursor first http://precursormod.com/

Still with me? Then I’ll begin.

I enjoyed Precursor quite a bit, it’s got some good action and a very classy intro, one I could easily imagine in a proper Half Life game. The setup is clear: you’re part of the resistance and GMan’s job for you is securing White Forest before Gordon sets HL2 in motion. You get some very cinematic and impressive scenes with flashes of GMan, tonnes of atmosphere before you’re obliterated by the rocket launch. If the first page of a book is supposed to grab the reader, the first 45 seconds of precursor will certainly grab you.

For the most part Precursor follows the conventions used in the rest of the HL games like lambda signs signal stashed goods or the intended direction of progress, however I’m sure that around a third of the doors I tried to open throughout the course of the game being locked. This goes against one of the conventions of the Half Life games set up by Valve: only doors that you can use have handles, they even mention this in one of the commentary nodes.

Another broken convention is that of mechanics being taught in a safe situation first, towards the end you’re ambushed by a lone hunter (which had an amazing reveal only moments before). It has some kind of recharge unit where it runs off to heal itself before it dies. Now if you’re anything like me, you didn’t get that close to it and when it ran off you could barely see what it was doing and were busy reloading or scrambling behind a rock smashing up crates then before you know it the hunter was back in your face. Well it took me until my third life to realise it was running off and healing itself (all the while I’m thinking: ‘This thing has a lot of gorram health’), Then a further attempt was needed after I realised it had not one but two more of these recharge stations. I understand the need to make a boss fight hard, but changing the behaviour of an enemy everyone already knows how to fight isn’t fun, it’s hellishly frustrating. Sending in two or three hunters would have been a better solution, the last hunter standing could still have run away just the same. The running away also was a little odd, mainly because it was walking and suddenly invincible.

Precursor boasts some good visuals even if a lot of fade distances and areaportal windows have quite harsh settings. The range is quite nice, you get to go from the suburbs of City 17 through the industrial sectors, then ride a train and end up in the forests of Episode 2, although it’s clear you haven’t reached your goal of white forest. Which leads me on to the disappointment in Precursor, the ending is abrupt, you get the same style of text on the screen as is shown at the start when your objective is stated (or when you die under certain circumstances in HL2) informing you that you’re not there yet. At this point I’m thinking ‘Oh good, a sequel is on the way’. But straight after you get an epilogue scene, you’re being congratulated on securing White Forest. Looks like there is no sequel after all and the middle and end of the story was just stolen from you leaving a really bad taste even though the mod, as a whole, was very good.

If you got this far and still haven’t played it, go do so, I haven’t spilt all of the beans and it’s well worth it. http://precursormod.com/

In contrast to my last post, I’d like to highlight two games and their methods of making me buy (and nearly buy) a console just so I could play that one game.

First up, Pokémon, I bought a DSi XL just so I could revive my Pokémon fantasies of yesteryear. I’ll admit when the game was first splashed all over the media back when the Japanese version went on sale I was unimpressed and not in any mood to rejoin the Pokémon train. But when it came to the UK release something primeval took hold of me, a deep unquenchable desire to relive the hundreds upon hundreds of hours of my childhood playing Pokémon Blue. This urge prompted me to go straight to the nearest place that would sell it the day after release and buy a £150 console for a £30 game that I might not even enjoy.

Only after I’d forked over the cash (or rather waved my magical plastic card thing) did I start to rationalise the purchase to myself, “£180 means 180 hours of playing at £1 an hour, I just need to play more than that and it’s been worth it”. Which actually is a philosophy I use for many things and serves me pretty well. I’m certainly approaching that goal with Pokémon.

The next game to cause a deep perturbation in the pit of my essence was Sword & Sworcery EP. After watching one hell of an amazing trailer and following the associated twitter accounts I became uncontrollably hyped for this incredible game, nay! incredible work of art. However, owning no touchtronic device (iPad and at a later date iPhone) suitable to experience such an audiovisual feast I remain among the unenlightened.

I am deeply saddened by the knowledge that I will only be able to experience this masterpiece by buying a vastly overpriced fruit. One day I will find a way though, one celestial fluke of a day.

What are these games, and what have they done so wrong?Rage, and Dead Island.

Rage caught my interests a long time ago with promising a looking engine and in depth videos of iD’s authoring tools. Then the gameplay videos came and it promised to be everything Borderlands had but better. Dead Island revealed itself more recently with an incredible artistic trailer, enough to get anybody to at least investigate it later even if it turned out to be ‘just another zombie game’.

Rage fell first with a proper trailer a few months back, the trailer itself started well: The asteroid Apophis impacted the Earth setting up the post-apocalyptic world in a slightly different way. Some cool gameplay things are shown, then just as you think the trailer is over, when I was thinking something along the lines of “Damn, this looks good”, they completely ruin it by showing you a 20 meter tall mutant thing roaring at the camera.

I haven’t followed the Dead Island media at all other than the initial trailer, my impression was all right though it probably wasn’t for me but I’d check it out at release time to see if it had anything going for it. Someone linked me to the image below and shattered my view of Dead Island as a fresh artistic take on the zombie apocalypse and sent it hurtling into that dead zone of games which seem to think 6 meter tall mutants/zombies are cool and acceptable.

Is it so wrong of me to want sensible monsters to fight rather than the incredibly unimaginative and very stale “Oversized Human”? Will developers and even filmmakers ever grow out of this immature drivel producing style?

Today is a red letter day, Mann Manor has had over 8,000 people buy 10,000 stamps through the Team Fortress 2 store and Hoodoo is following just 150 stamps behind it.

I never imagined that anything like this would be happening when I bought the Orange Box back in 2007, the levels that TF2 has escalated to and the quality of the community surrounding it continue to amaze me. Seventeen community maps and uncountable community made weapons and hats added to a game that originally had just three weapons per class and only six maps and the team responsible are showing no signs of slowing down.

So I’d like to offer my thanks to everyone who has bought stamps, everyone who has made anything for this game, be that fan art, model replacements, maps or anything else that shows love of TF2, everyone who runs servers and communities that play with the stuff we make, and to everyone who plays TF2.

Thank you all.