Hello everyone, Damien here, lead developer of the Epsilon modification for Portal! Happy New Year of 2018 to everyone! And there is a lot to talk about today.
First of all, i want to announce that every map that has been done so far will be remastered for the Beta/Official Release. Based on the feedback i have received over the past few weeks from the alpha testers, i have decided that there will be a few changes to the gameplay:
1. i want the player to control the pace of the progression in the introductory tests (from test chamber 00 until about test chamber 09 or 12).
2. based on the positive reaction to the glass roofs that expose test chambers to natural lighting, the sky, i decided that those skyboxes will be included in all test chambers.
3. i will try to make tests that will require the portal gun which only has the primary function (which is to fire the blue portal, but in our case, its pink), but that is not unsure due to coding issues, which will be talked about next.
Now, let's talk about some of the major issues. As you know, if you have played the alpha build of my mod, you get the dual portal device immediately in test chamber 03, because of the issues i have encountered with the crosshair for the portalgun. If you're one of those modders who have tried to recolor the crosshair, you know the struggle. The issue is: when you use a portalgun with only primary or secondary function of the device, the crosshair will would show up as if you are able to fire both portals. The crosshair will be clear if you disable the coding, but the colors will lay overtop if you enable the coding.
Luckily, recently one of my friends Richard, who knows C++, which all Source games use, joined my dev team and will do the crosshair recoloring (hopefully). As it turns out, the crosshairs are hard-coded into the game via the client.dll file which is located in your /steamapps/common/Portal/portal/bin/. The worst part is, the coding problem comes from some coding function which i'm not going to spoil yet (for the sake of it being somewhat of a dev privacy). That said, hopefully our own code will be written for the crosshair colors and we will compile a custom version of Portal in order to recolor the crosshair for the portalgun, which sounds like a lot of tedious work, but we don't have any other options for creating "single-portal" maps other than just not having them.
Just to clearify this, as of now in the Beta, tests from chamber 02, until i don't know which chamber, will be "single-portal" tests for now, but if the coding plan does not work out, i will stick to using the cheap method of recoloring the crosshair texture and disabling the color coding, which also means that i will recreate the maps from "single-portal" tests to "normal" tests. But i hope that everything will work out and i will be able to create "single-portal" tests for the mod (as i am expecting to make bonus maps, which i will have a contest for later).
Another thing i wanted to tell you, is that i might retitle/rebrand the mod again. I usually become unsatisfied with most of the titles i come up with, so, bare with me *lol*. If i will come up with an actual good title for the mod that i know i will be satisfied with, i will create a seperate article about that. Other than that, there aren't really many updates, other than my improvement in level design (which you can see above on screenshots).
I hope you have a great 2018, and i am hoping to bring you my mod this year!
~ Sir Nightshade / Damien.
