The end of the year Update news - Abyss mod for Portal 2

Here we are reaching the end of another year, 2017 has been a slow year for this mod regarding progress, as is supposed to be we have our real lives to take care of and in that department 2017 was a busy one generating a lot of creative burnouts and narrowing the time to work on the mod, Not to mention we’ve both been at school/college. This is an ambitious project and with only 2 active members working on the actual building of the maps, me (Seji) and Pac, means that any issue with our disponibility puts the whole thing into a halt, mainly because we kinda have just one mapper working right now, me (Seji), Pac is working on them too but is more on the pre/post-production of things.

It has being really great to work on it tho aside all the problems that we had since the start of this project, (loss of content/hard crashes/members leaving/epic camp battles against the evil forces of hammer editor stability) and we're proud that even with those issues and the ones said earlier we managed to make some progress but with the obvious lack of staff, it has been a slow one with only around 5 maps of the 25-30 planned done.
That’s not counting a big technical issue Pac had during the summer (formatted his backup drive by accident....) Thanks to Steamworks, we haven’t lost much for Abyss anyway.

To this, we can safely say that the Mod is more or less 15-20% completed (yay?).
We’re still looking for new members to join the team. Especially Mappers which will drastically accelerate the process, along this year we evaluated a bunch of candidates but pretty much all of them couldn’t pass the Test or simply left before completing it, meaning we might still endure slow progress for a bit more time I suppose.

It’s important to keep in mind that we’re trying to prioritize Quality over Quantity…. Well… to a point which cost us a lot.

We’re often hitting the Entdata or Brush limits, Source is a 15 years old engine and it shows we pretty much always end up having to find ways around these issues and it can take weeks if not months just to get it done properly, even then we might end up scraping entire maps and ideas when there’s just nothing to be done to get around the issue that pretty much pops up in the most undesired times.

A good analogy of the Source Engine, more specifically for us the Portal 2 branch, is a Duct Tape monster lurking in the shadows waiting to pop up with an unexpected issue, but hey we still like working on it either way, aside from all those issues with stability it does stand together and is fun to build stuff on it.

The original Release date was planned to be around Xmas 2018 but we have no idea if this can still be achieved, and for the looks, it won’t, It means 1 more year and with our current staff and schedule, that’s way too soon. We could do it if we end up with like 5-10 mappers and the Source Code of Portal 2, though, I think is more likely for us to Win at the Lottery before that happen tho.

The reason of this post is to update you folks about what’s has been going behind the scenes in this project so far and to also put you guys more up to date on the progress of the mod, there is no intention to suspend the production or cancel the mod, and we plan to work on it till completion, but, in projects like this where everything is voluntary and dependent of the disponibility of those involved unfortunately those options must be kept in place as a possibility.

To end this ginormous post in a more happier tone here's a further look on the portal gun model be aware tho that it is still in need of rigging/animating/porting to source, that said, enjoy =)

Thanks for taking the time to read this, we appreciate all the support and feedback you guys have been providing to us in all of those years if you want to follow the development of the mod more closely, Feel free to join the Discord.

Since this is the last update of the year we wanna wish you a Happy Christmas next week, and of course a rly rly Happy new year.