f13.net

Valve Takes the Whole \"Prey Thing\" One Step Further



So, yea, Prey just got less fun by comparison.

So it's a puzzle game masquerading as an FPS.

That and TF2 bundled into the HL2:E2 purchase?

Sold. Just give me a few rooms with funky physics, various objects (some explodable), a few harmless NPCs and I'll have hours of guilty giggling fun.

Wow.  That looks rather unique.  I Just went from not caring about Portal to really looking forward to it.  Seems like it will mesh well with Gmod.

I think my CPU just assploded from thinking about running that thing.

Some of the moves executed in the demo....all I could say is, "WHAT!?" I am in disbelief.

Oh yeah, bundled with TF2? Pfft, pre-ordered.

Awesome

whoa  /keanu


Yeah my system would die trying to run that, but I'll have to make sure :)

Spicoli and Neo in the same thread. The hype is strong with this one.

Just think of it...warp jumps....people flying in all the wrong directions...throwing nades into portals... :evil:

Well, Prey does a lot of it, the portals are just pre set. Needless to say, I'd kill for this portal shit to be in every Valve game.

Dude, you could be sniping at one chokepoint, and have a portal set up so you culd effectively watch and snipe another. Pure genius.

Yes. By letting you decide where to put the portals, it is indeed Camper's Paradise.

Wacky. Team Fortress 2 AND Portal + Episode Two? If that's true the argument about Steam being a ripoff go right out the fucking window.

Even at $30 that'd be a steal. They had better allow modders access to the portal tech though.

That is fucking impressive.

After watching the video a couple times, I'm fairly convinced that the portals are a clever combination of the camera/projection and teleport functions that are already available in Source.  The "portal" is just a video screen, like the ones they've had since the first Source tech demo, combined with a simple teleport trigger.

YES, BUT A GUN THROWS IT.

A GUN THROWS IT.

FUCKING MAGIC.

It's magic if I can shoot people through the portals.

You can in Prey. No way Valve would be showed up by Broussard and Co.

Except the video never showed you firing a weapon "projectile" through the portals (you can toss objects through with your grav gun hybrid but that's it). In other words Samwise may be right and it could just a simple object teleportation hack which might not currently support firing weapons through them.

I want to shoot a guy in the back with the portal and jump through it.

Look at the part of the video where the turret is bobbing up and down as it "falls" between the two portals in the floor. The portal looks like it has "depth." I suspect projectiles will go through just fine.... or at least I hope so.  :-)

I put "projectiles" in quotes cause many FPS weapons are "hitscan" weapons meaning there isn't actually a projectile that travels through space so there's nothing to actually teleport. Sure if you are firing a slow ass rocket launcher missile that would probably work since you could in theory teleport that through but what if you were firing a shotgun or chaingun? That would be more difficult.

In Prey, machine guns work fine.

Brings telefragging to a new level.

Actually, hitscan is even easier. You simply, during the hitscan test, calculate the angle and re-test as if you were firing out from the portal's location. There's no need to call the teleport code, simply add/subtract math for the angles will suffice.

That's true if the engine knows that the portals are actually "holes" in the geometry and not just special textures/decals overlaid onto exisiting geometry that would normally block shots.

Portal and TF2 are certainly more compelling than a 5 hour FPS add-on imo. Since it's mostly about multiplayer, it's pretty much not for me, but it sounds cool.

skill maps with portals?!!?! mmmmmmmmmmmmm

EDIT: just a scenario: after conc jumping towards a wall, in mid-air shoot the portal to some platform and make the entry where you are going to hit. Possibilities are endless...

Maybe I didn't explain properly. Hitscan wouldn't treat them as holes in the geometry; hitscan doesn't do anything but raytrace to see if you can hit what you aimed at. It doesn't really have any concept of the 3d world in general. It can't really be a special texture/decal overlaid onto existing geometry - it would have to be an object, since textures/decals aren't mutable once the level is loaded. So, it detects that you've hit the object, a portal. Additonal code is spawned that fires the same hitscan weapon you fired, from the exit portal location, using the appropriately calculated complement angle.

Yea, imagine creating 2 holes directly oposite to each other though, then switch of the hit box for yourself and fire a straight bullet. It would have to trace the bullet for eternity. I guess shit like that could fuck up multiplayer, situations where there will be extremly long traces should apear fairly frequently if placing portals all over the place becomes popular.

That could possibly crash a server.

Yeah, I'm afraid I may just have to get Episode 2 for the Team Fortress alone. The other stuff is just gravy.

i wonder if you can shoot a portal through someone else's portal...

http://www.fz.se/filarkiv/?file=mov/team_fortress_2/tf2_teaser01_720p.wmv (http://www.fz.se/filarkiv/?file=mov/team_fortress_2/tf2_teaser01_720p.wmv)

Downloading it, description says it introduces the classes in TF2.

Eh, not really. Unless it's been specifically set up by someone in the map editor, to create two portals and have a gun fire between them, it's highly unlikely and I'd say even nearly impossible to get the thing to bounce more than 10 or 15 times. Removing the fact that you'd be standing in the way of the bounce, servers can easily handle 15 people firing at once, which is essentially what portals would create. Furthermore, if you were looking for a specific counter, you'd simply have a counter that increments every time it bounces and simply stop it at 10 bounces or so.

Oh, I suppose you could artificially limit the "teleports" like that. I was thinking infinite fire thing would cause a problem.

That and, if you look at the Source SDK docs, it specifically states that traces (for hitscan or other things) have an upper distance limit that they'll trace to, so even if you managed to get it to fly through the portal a whole mess of times, it'll eventually stop tracing after the distance limit is achieved. You could, in a mod, set up something with a ridiculously long trace limit (it's an argument to the trace function) and try to crash the server like that, I suppose, but if their trace code is good, it'd just jump back to the start of the trace after modifying the trace's vector with the surface normal of the portal. Long loop, but probably pretty tight.

There's no way you could make a hitscan weapon fire forever with two portals facing eachother, since to get a shot to go forever you would have to fire it perfectly straight into one of the portals...which would result in you being hit. If it's off at any angle and doesn't manage to hit you somehow, it'll just travel through the portals until it has moved enough to miss entering one.

If it's an acute enough angle, that could take quite a number of calculations.

*smacks forehead at yoru/fabricated*

I know I'm not the only person wishing I could give out "nerd points" in this thread.

what if you enabled both infinite tracer length AND full bullet penetration? Can i get some points now?

You really need to go into nerdy detail of why that would be so cool/overpowered/server-crashing or whatever to qualify for points, sorry.  Better luck tomorrow!

I only knew that because I was looking at the Source SDK docs yesterday to satisfy some curiosities about their object model.

Turns out it's similar to MFC and COM, which amused me to no end.

Okay, I guess that is pretty nerdy.  :oops:

This looks like the kind of game that would make me throw my mouse.  Camper's paradise is the tip of the iceberg, the whole ruleset for FPS thinking goes out the window.  Putting Bugs Bunny portable holes in a FPS is going to make a lot of grown men cry.  It had better have fucking sticky grenades, too.

Very nerdy.  Don't bring that up when trolling for poon.

Theoretically you should be able to put a hole in one wall and another right next to it perpendicular and make recursive grenades. God this is going to be fun.

I have to say, ever since Tribes1 opened up the z-axis to me I've found standard fps so damn boring I just can't get into it anymore.  Something I was trying to bring up when I drunkenly rambled about K-games was that I think that games where you have to learn something to play well are something we need more of, not less.

This looks and sounds cool, any hope I had of not getting re-involved w/ Valve has gone out the fucking window it seems I've been saying I'm going to get HL2/CS:S for like 4 months now for various reasons.

Apparently this was originally a Digipen student project, and Valve picked up the whole team when they graduated.  Das details:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narbacular_Drop

Good for them for doing something so cool for a school project.

EGM (or maybe PC Gamer, I forget), covered this game in it's FREE GAME section right before E3.  It's just getting press now. I find that interesting. Slap Valve on it and make a pretty trailer and it's suddenly HUGE. That said, I didn't look into it either when I read about it in a magazine and only noticed how cool it was when the trailer came out.

Heh.

As much as I'd like to bury them all up to their necks in concrete, there's a reason markerters exist.

Late to this thread.


Holy.   Fuck.


Valve have some big fucking brains working there.  Big.  If they can only crack that AI stuff, I don't reckon I'd need to buy games from anyone else.

Man, I miss Tribes2. I wish Planetside has used jetpacks.

It's not so much the Valve logo as the trailer.  There's a difference between hearing about the game in the abstract and seeing teh shiney for yourself.

I was going to mention this, except you already had.  I know it from looking at writing mods for Quake and UT.  Both had distance limits on the hitscan function, I couldn't imagine someone else taking it out.  It's basically how quake limited the range on the shotgun.

And I have to agree with everyone else.  This looks Freekin' Cool.  I may have to actually purchase something from Valve.  Dangit.

Alkiera