News of a forthcoming update.

It's hard to imagine that the last time we spoken true word about Blue Portals was in 2011. What happened to Refresh? UP? and what about those strange pictures we posted in April? And most importantly; what is the future of Blue Portals?

Back in 2011, we were working on a mappack called Blue Portals: Refresh. It was suppose to be a more wackier approach to the Blue Portals environment and included fun and crazy sounds, along with party balloons. It was also suppose to link the ending of Blue Portals, but not directly. I forgot why exactly this project stopped, but as I was playing the maps over again, half of them are broken pretty bad.

There was also a version of Blue Portals: Refresh that was just Blue Portals 2 puzzles in a broken down environment. (This was after we announced cancellation of BP2) While it looked nice and pretty, the performance was terrible when the player created two linked portals. I sadly don't have any screens of this build as all the screens have been uploaded to Zilefile, which has been down since 2011.

Ideas for Blue Portals came as fast as they left. I eventually (and many others) just started to get bored with Portal mapping in-general. With me, projects stopped being fun unless I had code to compile. Early 2012, I started PUNT (soon to be listed as Vectronic). However, we still came back to BP briefly from time to time.

The idea of a New Blue Portals was interesting to us, so Colossal made a new set of textures, and I've remade the BP2 maps. But, due to Portal 2's limitations, and Source 2013's handicaps, this would be a difficult task, and would be much more work then fun.

So, now we've come to the update. This update will have the Steampipe gameinfo fix, controller support (Has an updated config), and will include Extended Play, The Planet Phillip Contest Maps, and Conversion Cubed. The update will also have the removal of the Time Trials maps, and files that only been used in test maps.

However, we have one small problem. I really don't want to recompile the maps not only because I'm not set up for it, but I can't rebuild the cubemaps. I would have to extract the Portal content to the 2007 engine, and I really don't want to do this. This is not a problem at all, however the last map (bp_11) crashes upon the projected texture, and if that's disabled, it crashes when the map goes to the credits. If you have gotten Blue Portals to work with the Steampipe update, I ask for you to play the last map and see if it crashes. No one is reporting it here, so I just wanna make sure it's not just me. You can PM me if it does or does not, and maybe look at it yourself with the Blue Portals SDK Files. Don't follow the installation instructions as it's out of date. I've noticed a broken I/O connection with the path tracks and trains. My next guess is to compare the 2007 code and 2013 code about that kind of stuff.

The goal now of Blue Portals is to keep it 100% playable, but also not change what we released in 2010. (Like now we don't have much of a choice.) Hopefully, I'll be posting here for big announcements, but for smaller updates, please check my Twitter feed.

Thanks
~reepblue