Ultimate Portal 2 Modding Guide

This guide will cover all the essential parts of Portal 2 modding. Some methods described may or may not work for other source engine games.

Preparation

In this guide, we will create a simple Portal 2 sourcemod, which is going to be called "Portal 2 Modding Guide". The first thing we need to do is download the Portal 2 Authoring Tools. You can find this toolset under "Tools" on Steam if you own Portal 2. (Make sure Portal 2 is installed). Run the tool and you'll see a box like this. We will only really need the Hammer World Editor. The model viewer can be handy when debugging models and the Face Poser is needed to build scene image files.

• Sdk.png

  portal 2 authoring tools

Creating the mod

To create the sourcemod, navigate to your steamapps directory. (Usually located at C:\Program Files(x86)\Steam\steamapps). In there, should be a folder called "sourcemods". If it doesn't exist, create it. In the sourcemods directory, create a new folder with the name of your mod. Put a file in there and call it "gameinfo.txt". Copy and paste this template into the gameinfo.txt:

"GameInfo"
{
	game        							"Portal 2 Modding Guide" // The name of your mod (will be displayed in steam)
	gamedata							"portal2.fgd"
	icon								"resource/icon" // Path to the icon (displayed in steam and, window and task bar)
       	gamelogo   			 				1
      	SupportsDX8    							0
       	SupportsXbox360 						0
       	FileSystem
      	{
           	SteamAppId 						620 // The steamappid of Portal 2
           	ToolsAppId 						211 // The toolsappid of the Source Sdk
          	SearchPaths
           	{
               		Game                	|gameinfo_path|. // Your own assets
               		Game                	portal2_dlc2 // DLC 2 assets
               		Game                	portal2_dlc1 // DLC 1 assets
			Game			portal2 // Base Portal 2 assets
			platform		platform // Core engine files
           	}
       }
}

After that, restart Steam and you'll find your mod listed in your library.

The next step is to create your asset directory and other necessary files. Luckyly, source does this automatically when starting the mod, so all we need to do is start it through steam.