FAQ

General

Will the Puzzle Maker be made available on the XBOX 360 and PS3 versions of Portal 2?

For now, the editing in Puzzle Maker and consuming puzzles via the Portal 2 Workshop will be for PC and Mac versions only.

Testing

Why can't Turrets shoot through portals?

This is intentional and by design. During the game's development, turrets could shoot through portals. This led to several bad experiences where playtesters would place a portal and then instantly get mowed down by bullets from an unseen direction. It often wasn't clear to players that it was a result if something they had done, and it really interfered with puzzle-solving. Changing it so that turrets can't shoot through portals helped a lot, and allowed for better puzzles in general.

Note: If you want turrets to shoot through portals, open up [Steam]/steamapps/common/portal 2/sdk_content/maps/instances/p2editor/turret.vmf in a text editor, find the turret object, and change the "AllowShootThroughPortals" value from 0 to 1.

Publishing

When you edit a published map and save it, does that update the published version?

No. When you make changes to an already published map, those changes are local-only. (The word 'Published' gets a little star next to it to indicate that what you have is out of sync.) To make the changes live, you must re-publish.

Is there was a way to tweak and update published maps without having to delete and re-publish?

Yes. Just go to the Puzzle Maker, open the map, edit it, save it, and click publish. This will update the map and keep all of the ratings, comments, screenshots, etc. You can keep revising this way. Deleting a map loses all that important history and information, and should be avoided unless that's what you really want.

Hammer

Does Puzzle Maker replace Hammer or make the Authoring Tools obsolete?

The Puzzle Maker doesn't replace Hammer or the Portal 2 Authoring Tools in any way. It is meant to compliment them. Authors are free to use one or the other as they see fit. In fact, many Hammer users choose to use both.

Can authors export chambers made in Puzzle Maker to Hammer/Portal 2 Authoring Tools?

Yes. Puzzle Maker exports VMF format files that can be opened directly in Hammer for further fine tuning. Puzzles can be exported by opening up the console in the editor and typing 'puzzlemaker_export mapname', sans apostrophes, with mapname being the name of your map. It should be noted that when doing this you may need to open up the entrance elevator instance in your map and change the value for $no_player_start to 1 in order for the player to start in the elevator when uploaded. (Fixed, possibly?)

How about the other way? Can you export Hammer files back to the Puzzle Maker?

No. The export is one-way only, from Puzzle Maker to Hammer. Hammer is a very advanced and generalized tool, whereas the Puzzle Maker is totally focused on Portal 2 puzzle chambers. There's no way to easily allow Puzzle Maker to read VMF files.