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Written by Jim Rossignol on October 29, 2007 at 9:43 am.

Mapping folk are never particularly slow about churning out maps for new games, but the rate at which Portal stuff is appearing nevertheless surprises me. A whole bunch of new maps can be found over at Portal Maps, varying from the absolutely basic sandbox to the fairly complex challenges. I’ve only had a chance to play through a couple, but some, such as Glasschamber, seem even more fiendish than the Portal levels themselves.

Meanwhile a search of Moddb reveals that no Portal modding projects have yet been announced. Tsk, get a move on Modders. (Yes, that’s your cue to link to a Portal mod, readers.) I guess in the meantime we’ll just have to play through all of Half-Life 2 with the portal gun.

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Steve says:

The lack of mods so far may be because the Portal SDK has not yet been released. It is scheduled for release soon I believe.

October 29th, 2007 at 10:49 am

Jim Rossignol says:

That hasn’t stopped there being a dozen Crysis mods announced.

October 29th, 2007 at 10:55 am

Thiefsie says:

The problem will soon be weeding out the quality from the pap I fear. I predict every man and his dog will have some sort of a go at this…? (Then again from my scant trying Hammer seemed a lot more complex than necessary, espec when compared to Unreal or FarCry/Crysis editing).

I know when I find some free time this will probably be the first thing I try and make a map for (in years), even if I know I’ll be hopelessly outclassed by numerous others in ideas and execution.

October 29th, 2007 at 11:44 am

Jon says:

Glass Chamber seems good, although I’ve yet to get past the first part… I r noob it seems.

October 29th, 2007 at 12:00 pm

drunkymonkey says:

Um, excuse me ignorance, but don’t you need the SDK to make the maps, or is it only Hammer you need for that?

October 29th, 2007 at 12:50 pm

King Awesome says:

You just need hammer and the entity definitions file which probably isn’t too hard to get hold of by extracting it. The SDK might make it nice and friendly to use though.

October 29th, 2007 at 1:03 pm

King Awesome says:

On the subject of Mods, I was going to say that I can’t think of any obvious ones but there are probably a few fun things that could be done with a quad portal gun.

Portal 1-> Portal 2-> Portal 3-> Portal 4.

October 29th, 2007 at 1:06 pm

Theory says:

I don’t think anyone is even sure what’ll be in the Portal SDK. Some people say the source code will be there, but that’s not official yet. It may turn out to be a Hammer profile and nothing more.

October 29th, 2007 at 1:08 pm

Alexander says:

No SDK required, Just teh hammre

oh and it’s funny Thiefsie started comparing the editors, I used to build in hammer, and now opened sandbox to mess around; but nothing makes sense. I am apparently invalvefused with hammerlogic

October 29th, 2007 at 1:09 pm

Theory says:

They don’t have my favourite!

October 29th, 2007 at 1:13 pm

Hober says:

There are also a number of quality custom maps over at http://www.thinkingwithportals.com . Check it out sometime. Our October mapping contest ends soon, and anyone can help judge the winner!

October 29th, 2007 at 1:26 pm

Ging says:

Jim - while that’s true, it’s been helped with Crytek sending the Crysis SDK to a small group of Crysis mod teams (Obsidian Edge 2 springs to mind). UT3 mods have also been announced in their thousands too, some have even started working with Roboblitz.

But there’s no basis for the code of Portal to start working from - you can get something hacked together like exite, but it’ll require the release of the “Orange Box” SDK code update before we can find out if we’ll actually see true Portal mods (and not just custom maps).

October 29th, 2007 at 1:34 pm

Thiefsie says:

Alexander… I’m probably feeling the same as you but in reverse? Haha in fact I’m probably slightly more swayed by my professional ties to 3d architectural modelling in 3D Max/Rhino/Sketchup/etc

October 29th, 2007 at 1:34 pm

Bobsy says:

Dear Everyone,

Please make a co-op mod + maps for Portal kthxbye

Love,

Bobs.

October 29th, 2007 at 2:47 pm

Chis says:

The only way I can see Portal co-op working is if one play fires the blue portal and the other fires orange. Would be interesting.

October 29th, 2007 at 3:09 pm

Chis says:

Argh there’s no edit. I meant one player fires.

October 29th, 2007 at 3:10 pm

Zing! says:

There’s always the 2D fan-made Portal (Flash-based) while ye wait:

http://portal.wecreatestuff.com/

Pretty cool for what it is, imo.

October 30th, 2007 at 4:25 am

Bobsy says:

No no no, each player has a portal gun. Player one does blue and orange, player two has green and… hmm… white. Puzzles require use of all four portals.

October 30th, 2007 at 9:38 am

Banjo says:

Co-Op is possible by changing the portal linkage ID, somebody just needs to figure out how to hack job the server from the console and it should be possible.. eh in theory ;)

August 21st, 2008 at 4:43 am

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