User talk:Mr.p.kiwi

Tables

Watch out!
Constructing tables here!

Trying to create good looking tables! ...You know, for the articles; but they need to reach perfection somewhere. If YOU feel like it, you can create a table here too, so that everyone can learn, including yourself. You can experiment on this page all day long - just leave your name as the title of the table, so that it'll be more organized.

To do such a thing, you would need to do something like this:

{| class="standard-table"
|+ your name goes here
!Header
|-
|Table
|}

For example:

Mr.p.kiwi 23:43, 31 July 2011 (PDT)

This will be a header	This will be a header2	This will be a header3
Column1; Row1	Column2; Row1
Column 1; Row 2&3		Column3; Row2
	Column2; Row3	Column3; Row3

External Links

• How to create tables

Underground Testing Tracks (Portal 2)

This Portal 2 tutorial will expand the Old Aperture page with various insightful tips and tricks too complex or long for the main article to contain.

In-Depth

Aperture Laboratories again proves they are able to find the most ridiculous ways of dealing with their issues as a growing facility. This time they bought a salt-mine and started building from the bottom upwards. Now they faced a new problem - how to build their testing tracks. Luckily they found a solution for that too, they built huge metal spheres that suspend hundreds of feet in these underground trenches. So a major component when designing an Old Aperture-themed map is capitalizing on the exterior portions of your map. The enrichment spheres are meant to give an ominous impression, full of damaged structures and deteriorated walkways. A successful Old Aperture map looks daunting – although it has survived the test of time, it has received scars and has potential for danger. Take for example this picture from Valve’s map in Portal 2 sp_a3_jump_intro.

The map is almost completely revealed at the start of the course, exposing all of the brittle supports and winding pipes. However, the feeling of anticipation is built as the player wonders what incredible events occur in the upcoming structures. Valve’s maps are designed like soundstages on a Hollywood movie lot to detach the player from the realities of Chell’s dire situation and enter the world of Aperture Science in its 1950’s heyday. In this next picture, taken from one of my Old Aperture maps, I attempted to recreate that same feeling: http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/541775700470392286/C2EE4B8CC0052EDF11B190717C9CA996F9F4A356/

By raising the next chamber up, I’ve given the building a dominating presence in my map – this is a place that the player will ultimately have to make his climb to the exit. No matter what kind of map you are working on, designing it with a vertical perspective is a good idea as it makes gravity its own puzzle element and gives the player the sense of progress. I’d also like to take the time to note how important lighting is in Old Aperture maps. Unlike its clean counterpart, Old Aperture should have plenty of variance between dark and light to display the importance of certain areas and elements. There’s a lot of extra space in the spheres, so designers need to use light to show where the player should and shouldn’t need to go.

Since much of the exterior work is built to make the player anticipate the upcoming chambers (unless you specifically designed a puzzle to work outdoors in Old Aperture, which has its own upsides and downsides), making the interiors is equally important. Here is an example from the same Valve map:

http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/54177 ... D153227DB/

The important element in this map, and throughout the Old Aperture section of the game, is the function over cosmetic point of view. These “sets” aren’t designed to impress people with their state-of-art architecture or beautiful design, but rather to supply as a testing stage that can be easily built. From this picture alone, we can see the bare bones of the structure are visible: the building’s framework lining the ceiling, the air conditioning system riding up the wall, metal and wood supports holding up corners and edges and left-over paint work. Here is my map again, trying to recreate that same feeling:

http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/54177 ... 324CDF62A/

If you use many different wall materials, it gives the impression that the builders of these sets were using whatever they could get their hands on: wood, metal, grating, sometimes nothing. Again, we see the left over paint work, which could have been used to tell the builders where to orient the test structure and is now left to hint the player. For the inside of the structure, I used a mixture of self-designed florescent lighting along with the “cold” light instances to give the section a more isolated, forgotten feeling in comparison’s to the exterior’s warmer, ominous glow. Again, it is important to highlight the pinnacle testing items.