User talk:Orsell

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Porting humanoids to Portal 2

I could genuinely kiss you for saying how to fix the buggy walking of generic_actor.
Now I can finally make my maps feel more alive!

MarvinG (talk) 13:35, 26 January, 2025 (CEST)

No problem! Apparently, a few people in the P2 community have known about this fix for some time, but weird nobody has yet put it on this page. Honestly I didn't know this page existed until the same day I made the edit. Some maps on the P2 workshop do utilize this fix for their map like this one map by MoistSkittles. Technically, this is my first ever page edit too on the VDC, talk message too, even though I use it tons for documentation. There are always just few things out there I have noticed are a little outdated, so I might do some more edits in the future. I plan to add more to the page when I test out what still works. So far I've managed to get path_tracks, scripted_scenes, and logic_choreographed_scene entities to work. But of course, as mentioned before on the page, the face movements won't work out of the box and will need manual adjustments. I plan to fix the weird movement issue directly in a Source Engine plugin I am making for Portal 2 SourceMods that will contain other QoL things for Portal 2 mods.

Orsell (talk) 02:02, 31 January 2025 (PST)

That's pretty cool, it's always good to have another Portal 2 enthusiast sharing their knowledge on here. I also work tirelessly to get old stuff working again in Portal 2 and I just love finding old obscure stuff that the devs left over like item_suit being spawnable and the really useful skybox_swapper entity.
When I saw that video by MoistSkittles I immediately knew that there had to be another way of fixing the stuttering. The discovery of cl_localnetworkbackdoor was really exciting to me because I found it by accident. I was searching through all the Portal 2 console commands for a way to force the game to use subtitle files that are packed into the map (there is none unfortunately) and the word "local network backdoor" just clicked in my mind. Since Portal 2 is always technically running a server it would only make logical sense that if there is something "optimizing" the traffic between the client and server disabling it should improve the npc packets. Even net_graph 2 supported that theory because if you were to look at the packet graph you can see that when recording a demo the server is sending a lot more packets, in-fact it even states that in the console since it says "Sending full update to Client". It's really unfortunate that lip sync doesn't work, I've tried for a couple hours to find out why but no luck there. I even found out why faceposer won't rebuild scenes.image sometimes in my attempts, but I got nowhere close to a solution for the lip sync.
I hope you do finish that plugin because it's genuinely a really good idea. There are so many things in portal 2 that frustrate me because of how stupid easy they would be to fix if valve changed like one line of code in the game, for example env_sun disappearing when covered by the crosshair. So that could be a good way to finally fix that.

MarvinG (talk) 01:38, 9 March, 2025 (CEST)

Yeah, I first heard down the line from MoistSkittles that it could have been cl_localnetworkbackdoor, and indeed that was it. I was about to update the Portal 2 NPC page with the new info, but you just updated it as I was about to push changes, so it conflicted, so I let you have that one ;). I then learned down the line that you told Skittles, which I then saw by a message in Discord by them. It's a small world lol. But yeah, even when I was looking into why demos were the solution, I made a mistake in my efforts by just seeing what recording demos were doing to make it work rather than seeing how demos were affecting the rest of the code. Managed to track it down to here in the cstrike15_src repo: cl_main.cpp-Line363. As you can see, it checks if it's not recording a demo, and if it is, the "network optimizations" get disabled, allowing NPCs to move correctly. The "Sending full update to Client' piece was a red-haring for the whole thing and is simply what is called in code when the function GetBaseLocalClient().ForceFullUpdate is called for some server-side Valve stuff that involves how networked entities are networked.

Also thanks for the praise on the plugin. Technically, it has already been released as version 1.0 to stop some PETI workshop shenanigans I was helping solve with another Portal 2 mod I am a developer of, Portal: Divinity. At the moment, it is more just quick QoL stuff like the NPC stuff and a few other issues going on in-game. My goal with its purpose is to help provide patches and potentially some other features that could help Sourcemods out until the P2:CE team releases their open beta. I will keep in mind some of the things you mentioned and write them down in the to-do list, but I should note I am limited to just fixing things in the game and not things like faceposer, even though I wish I could fix its buggy mess. But again, thanks for the support!

Orsell (talk) 20:33, 9 March 2025 (PDT)

minor edits

Hi Orsell! I noticed that you recently marked an edit as minor that may not have been. "Minor edit" has a specific definition on Wikipedia—it refers only to superficial edits that could never be the subject of a dispute, such as typographical error or reverting obvious vandalism. Any edit that changes the meaning of an article is not a minor edit, even if it only concerns a single word. --Nescius (talk) 16:08, 8 March 2025 (PST)

As an addendum, you may want to go into your user settings to change the default edit type to major; its minor by default.
— SirYodaJedi (talk) 16:11, 8 March 2025 (PST)

It isn't set to minor by default. Even quickly created new account to make sure --Nescius (talk) 16:18, 8 March 2025 (PST)

Huh, could've sworn it was.
— SirYodaJedi (talk) 16:19, 8 March 2025 (PST)

Hi SirYodaJedi and Nescius, I apologize for assuming it was more the idea that it was a marker used for a simple edit that wouldn't mass notify everyone who is currently watching the page, but yes what you told me makes more sense. Thank you for letting me know. It is off by default, and I assumed that was what I needed to turn on for such an edit. I am new to editing/updating info on these types of forms, so thank you for informing me. Orsell (talk) 20:00, 9 March 2025 (PDT)