Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Portal 2: Desolation is giving the classic puzzle game a graphics overhaul

pcgamer.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 48 posts

Re: Portal 2: Desolation is giving the classic puzzle game a graphics overhaul

#31

Post by jl6 »

pram wrote: post #15

One of my favorite gaming moments ever is the transition from the old test shafts back into the enrichment center (which leads to the finale) The area is like a bunch of platforms supported by gigantic springs. It made me stop and appreciate how mysterious, thoughtful, and interesting the entire environment was. I really just wanted to explore more of the depths after experiencing it.

My Portal 2 moment was thinking that the game was almost over at the point of falling down into the salt mine, only to discover this entirely unknown, enormous whole other environment.

Re: Portal 2: Desolation is giving the classic puzzle game a graphics overhaul

#32

Post by jordanpg »

tempodox wrote: post #27

Portal 2 is one of my favorite games ever, but it's missing a 64-bit upgrade.

Upgrading to Catalina has nearly knocked me out of the gaming scene altogether.

It might be enough to ensure that my next purchase is a PC, despite finding Windows loathsome.

Re: Portal 2: Desolation is giving the classic puzzle game a graphics overhaul

#33

Post by dmr_92 »

prezjordan wrote: post #24

For what it's worth, the Portal 2 community maps (available to download and play within the game itself!) are really good. Each week there are about 3-4 new really fantastic puzzles to play, and of course there's a healthy back catalog.

https://www.thinking.withportals.com/ was (is?) the big community for this. I was part of it around the time Valve released their easy map editor (the "perpetual testing initiative")---more than a decade ago now. I had the pleasure of testing the editor before its release. It was an exciting time!

Sadly that editor was geared towards single-player maps, whereas my interest was always in the coop ones. If you'll forgive the shameless plug, https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=89692... was my favourite to make. I put a lot of time into that, but sadly I lost the hard drive with the map's source files some years ago. It's done quite well on the workshop---which always surprises me. I had very little idea about level design or what constitutes a fun puzzle. Beginner's luck, maybe?

It was a lot of fun/pain/curiosity to work with and fight Valve's hammer editor. I remember thinking "this feels like a tool designed to make half-life maps". I can still remember tying brushes to func_detail entities so that they wouldn't contribute visleaves. Good times!

While I'm at it: I'd recommend the "sendificator" series: https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/?id=29165303... . These introduce a new puzzle element entirely contained within the map file. I'm guessing it must use some kind of lua script to implement it, since it's entirely contained in the map.

Re: Portal 2: Desolation is giving the classic puzzle game a graphics overhaul

#34

Post by lukifer »

jordanpg wrote: post #32
tempodox wrote: post #27

Portal 2 is one of my favorite games ever, but it's missing a 64-bit upgrade.

Upgrading to Catalina has nearly knocked me out of the gaming scene altogether. It might be enough to ensure that my next purchase is a PC, despite finding Windows loathsome.

Given the Herculean efforts (and superb results) of Rosetta and Rosetta 2, I'm still appalled that Apple couldn't have found a way to keep running 32 bit apps, even at a performance hit through some level of emulation or containerization.

In addition to countless classic games being dead in the water, my Mom was completely blindsided by the change, suddenly losing access to several old-but-trusted productivity apps, and she had to scramble to find replacements. I don't recall there even being a generic warning during the upgrade process, let alone "the following apps will no longer function: [...]; do you wish to proceed?"

Re: Portal 2: Desolation is giving the classic puzzle game a graphics overhaul

#35

Post by 7speter »

fartcannon wrote: post #18

Valve is great. Especially in comparison to some other game companies. Were this a Nintendo project, the devs would risk at best a Cease and Desist. The vibe I get from Nintendo is that they would probably flog their fan-game devs if they could legally get away with it. Let's see if Bethesda, under Microsoft, maintains their support of mods.

My head canon says that Valve allows fans of its ips to come out with these sorts of graphical remasters (theres also black mesa) because they are pretty preoccupied with steam.

Re: Portal 2: Desolation is giving the classic puzzle game a graphics overhaul

#36

Post by LichenStone »

Personally I never really like graphical overhaul mods that do more than just add subtle technical improvements to what's already there. The art direction is usually such an important part of a game that doing things like changing colours, shadows, and textures always seems to lose something that made the original coherent and unique.

The official remasters of Halo 1 and 2 are good examples of how not to do it, Halo CE Anniversary edition in particular is truly horrid. Initially I was quite warm to Halo 2's treatment, but on a subsequent replay I felt that the new graphics took something away from the composition of many of the scenes.

Games' graphics and level design are designed for a specific level of graphical fidelity at that time in history. Going back to things and adding more greebling everywhere and making the shadows fancier won't necessarily improve the game, signposting is a subtle art and it's easy reduce clarity with additive changes.

Doing graphics overhauls and remasters right, without corrupting the original art direction is really really tough. Most of the time it tends to go wrong, hopefully Desolation turns out great.

Re: Portal 2: Desolation is giving the classic puzzle game a graphics overhaul

#37

Post by mdaniel »

matthewfcarlson wrote: post #4

My only complaint is that I can’t put my email in to get updates.

I've never used it, but there's a Follow button on their linked site: https://www.moddb.com/mods/desolation and there's an RSS feed for news updates: https://rss.moddb.com/mods/desolation/articles/feed/rss.xml

Re: Portal 2: Desolation is giving the classic puzzle game a graphics overhaul

#38

Post by rockemsockem »

7speter wrote: post #35
fartcannon wrote: post #18

Valve is great. Especially in comparison to some other game companies. Were this a Nintendo project, the devs would risk at best a Cease and Desist. The vibe I get from Nintendo is that they would probably flog their fan-game devs if they could legally get away with it. Let's see if Bethesda, under Microsoft, maintains their support of mods.

My head canon says that Valve allows fans of its ips to come out with these sorts of graphical remasters (theres also black mesa) because they are pretty preoccupied with steam.

I think it's more than that. Surely having a money printing machine like steam makes it easier to ignore stuff like this, but you also have to remember that Counter Strike was a fan-made mod in the beginning and now it's one of the most played games on the planet and Valve produces it itself now. There's got to be a baked in appreciation for how letting fans do these sorts of things can directly boost their profits.

Re: Portal 2: Desolation is giving the classic puzzle game a graphics overhaul

#39

Post by rasz »

Man Im getting old, all I could hear in the attached Video was "We made it slower because our modern >$1K GPUs can run it, sucks to be you".

"no baked lights, reducing compile time from hours to minutes"

Logic error, my brain hurts. If they managed to optimize lighting subsystem to make it run at realtime speed then Light compile time could also take minutes. Why trying to sell it as some kind of speed optimization?

Re: Portal 2: Desolation is giving the classic puzzle game a graphics overhaul

#40

Post by Bjartr »

rockemsockem wrote: post #38
7speter wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My head canon says that Valve allows fans of its ips to come out with these sorts of graphical remasters (theres also black mesa) because they are pretty preoccupied with steam.

I think it's more than that. Surely having a money printing machine like steam makes it easier to ignore stuff like this, but you also have to remember that Counter Strike was a fan-made mod in the beginning and now it's one of the most played games on the planet and Valve produces it itself now. There's got to be a baked in appreciation for how letting fans do these sorts of things can directly boost their profits.

> that Counter Strike was a fan-made mod in the beginning and now it's one of the most played games on the planet and Valve produces it itself now.

As were DOTA and Team Fortress! Taking well loved mods and giving them some AAA shine has been a rather successful strategy for Valve.

Post reply on HN