Wednesday, July 19
News: Valve's Portals
The recently-released game P.R.E.Y. had quite a few very cool innovations to regular FPS gameplay. Perhaps the biggest of them was the portal technology. I recommend that you download the P.R.E.Y. demo and try it out for yourself; but suffice to say that they take a step past the "teleporters" that have been around since the Doom/Quake days... they have actual holes floating in space, which seamlessly connect to other places in space. You can walk around them, you can look through them, you can shoot through them... you can, potentially, see yourself through them.
Well Valve, as they tend to do with technology, has taken this a step further. This video should blow the mind of any gamer:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=GWzmL05OlYA
That's right... in this demo, they've merged the "gravity gun" with a feature to shoot and create portals wherever you want. And they do ever variation with this you can imagine. Just watch the video, there's too much there to try to describe.
I first heard about this on Gamasutra news the other day.
Finally, Valve's president and co-founder Gabe Newell noted during the presentation that a completely new single-player module for Half-Life 2: Episode 2, currently named “Portal”, was in development, which uses a spatial portal dropping concept (using a gun for placement).
This concept is similar to elements used in the recently released P.R.E.Y., and is apparently based on IGF Student Showcase winning title Narbacular Drop, which was reported to be in the process of being re-imagined in the Source Engine, with the help of its original creators.
So Valve has followed their historic (and very successful) pattern of hiring smart new students who know push the limits of technology and/or game design.
It's especially nice to hear that we'll be able to play this (or at least a demo with this technology) when HL2:Episode Two comes out.
More power to Valve for advancing the state of the (FPS) art by another notch.
Finally, Valve's president and co-founder Gabe Newell noted during the presentation that a completely new single-player module for Half-Life 2: Episode 2, currently named “Portal”, was in development, which uses a spatial portal dropping concept (using a gun for placement).
This concept is similar to elements used in the recently released P.R.E.Y., and is apparently based on IGF Student Showcase winning title Narbacular Drop, which was reported to be in the process of being re-imagined in the Source Engine, with the help of its original creators.
