edmlifexox
Haha, like your profile picture?

man when that cup tile came off i was so confused

This is cool! How did you manage to get this working?

Dude, that's freaking awesome)
Way to go.

Just thought of something, if you do want to go for a swim, the water materials probably work with toggleble textures too, so you could just add a nodraw as a second texture, but then you will get all the water effects if you step into the nodraw, so it's either/or.. Sorry for spam btw :3

Ah, I think it's because it's a "refract" material instead of "water". So hopefully, you weren't planning on going for a swim :D

I'm not sure why wiki says that cheap water has no refractions, but it's not the case.
https://content.tophattwaffle.com/Content/Watersource_v2.zip here's a bunch of textures, for example, I just tried making them into togglable brushes and they work, with refractions. Too lazy to look into what exactly makes them different from P2 textures to make them work like that, so it will be your job :P Or just plug in your ocean refraction texture into one of these and you should be golden, any of the waterfall textures should work, they are pretty much all the same.
If it's an island surrounded by water and sky, I feel, real-time reflections wouldn't add much anyways, and a bit of refraction for the bottom of the ocean will get the point across ;)

SunnyOst
The transiton between the island and the interior requires to have both environment present at the same place mixed into each other, and one must always be hidden from the player. This means that each component must be hidden at some point, so they have to be all entities.
Expensive is a water texture type which allows the water to be transparent and fancy, but limits its applicability to solid brush surfaces which cannot be hidden (or perform any other operation). Cheap water texture (which is used to create moving water or to reduce resource demand) on the other hand can be applied to bush entities as well, which are smart and can be hidden.
So far I've been using expensive water, thus - because it was a component I could not hide - the interior could not expand below sea level not to make the water visable.
This limitation makes level desingn really hard and should be resolved to carry out my ideas.
I hope I answered your questions.

What do you mean by hidable/non-hidable water texture?
And you want the whole island to disappear? If not, the water can be just a thin sheet around the island, with a hole cut out where the downwards part goes.

Another solution would be to get rid of the ocean island setting, and make the scenery terrestial, a forest, a meadow etc. instead. I have not applied this change yet, because I think it would would lose its symbolic value to some extent. An island is often associated with freedom, happyness, order, tranquility etc. which contrasts well with the imprisoned, upsetting, unsettled, insecure etc. setting of aperture science. What do you think?
Either way, I will sit down when there will be a break at university, and figure out how to get past this issue.

gchou2007 Thanks for asking, not so well, I'm stuck with a boring technical issue.
It's related to water textures: I have to replace the expensive (nice, transparent, but non-hidable) water texture with a cheap (opaque but hidable) one to be able to redesign and expand the interior ("reality") downwards, under the water level.
I invested many and many hours in finding or creating such water texture looking decent as an ocean, but I failed (so far). Maybe some external help from who understands this black magic could get the project back on track.

i meant the project

Hey samwolfe hope you're doing well and hows it going

I just finished my final exams, so the project is now a priority.

Well technically you can work on th project now because of covid 19 so..

Thanks for the feedbacks, they really help me stay motivated.

The project is unfortunately frozen at the moment due to my lack of free time (graduation). The finish of the map can be expected in the summertime. Also, I'm planning an educational Youtube series about the project covering the design and decision making process from start to finish.

Keep up the nice work

@samwolfe Thx for replying! Just wanted to throw my opinion out there, but it's sure to say it's still an amazing map with a lot of potential. If it would be somehow possible to implement this concept into an exploration-themed map, it would be even more enjoyable. After reading your reply, it felt much easier to understand the decisions taken in map design here. Still, you did an awesome job, as I would never be able to construct something like this myself. Keep up the good work!

this is super cool. keep up the good work

Thanks for the kind words!

@nock
- That lever has no sense, which couldn't be represented more than the way it turns. It's just a showcase of the island and interior mixed together
- I know what happened with you, it's a collision glitch, which will be fixed at some point.
Thanks for your feedback!

This is a very cool concept. Couple of things:

- The lever in the area at the side doesn't rotate properly in the box
- I managed to get trapped under the map. The area near the ped button allowed me into the water and the chamber reset, which then put me on the outside of the whole VR box, but in the VR world

Oof, that's a sexy looking beast! Great job! The transitions and glitch effects look amazing.. And it's such a graceful solution I'm in love and can't wait to see more from you! <3

I found out what files I missed when I was packing the map... sorry for taking me so long. However, a map sized above 100mb can't be uploaded on steam cloud. So I redesigned the map not to contain so many HL2 props.

Now the map is fixed and fully operational

Ah crap. I was looking forward to a full hammer map. :(

Sorry guys, I tried all I could to fix this map.:/ To keep my head clear, I need to stop doing hammer for a while, and getting over to other projects. Thanks for being active, I'll be back soon

My last idea is a fresh reupload
It can be reached here: https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1477544685

:/ I made a video on it, if you're interested in the map, the playable vesion have to wait for a bit:/ https://youtu.be/vLna7aBdH28

I'm sorry, but I'm still getting errors.

Repacked by pakrat, should workkk

imsogoofy_2
Those are dustcloud particles. The texture is a default Portal 2 asset. Just as the soft drink automat in v2. VIDE not just did nothing on the map but broke it? I can only think of VIDE being broken in the pipeline. I'm on it
Btw is there a way to test the texture packing out by rourself? It could make things easier

TheCompanionCubeGuy
Actually, the initial plan was indeed a default bts environment with those huge steel beam frames. But there's a limiting factor, which prevents the interior ["reallity"] have large open space.
The scene can't expand downwards. The floor must be above and hide the ocean layer, which cannot be hidden like any other walls and props.
However a workaround just came to my mind, so a visual update can still be expected in v4

Why are there so many sand particles just floating in the sky and it makes it hard to go the remote room

I personally would like the outside of the VR-box more looking like the "standard" BTS Aperture facility with vactubes and test chamber blocks, also I think that would fit the thing with the Portal Gun better. If you could do something like a broken observation room into an experimenting or a test subject storage area and let the player portal in there, it would be more "realistic" in my opinion. Besides the fact of the error signs and the broken whatever-that-is thing with the blocks which destroys the illusion, and that i couldn't take the "cup-of-tea-wall panel" (but that could be a problem with my laptop, who knows, you did an excellent job and I would love to see the final thing. Thanks for Creating!

There are too many errors. . Is this fixable?

I have tried over and over. No way to interact with anything besides the portal gun and the removed plate. My map also looks like this https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1470848580

zeo1337
Try to drink the cup of tea sitting on the table

I haven't found anyway off the beach

Remote controll location: https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1472268522

Havent found a remote anywhere

maybe now...

Still borked, unless I somehow need to re-add the map to my queue for the update to work.

https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1470848580

Anachronistic ALLOS
I reuploaded it, now it hopefully works again
(I repacked it. This bug was probably caused by a program error, which get fixed by reinstalling Vide)

I, ah...think something went wrong with the packing. Because there were lots of error signs on the beach (anything that wasn't the table, mug or radio) and something funky was going on in the office area. There were just a lot of sprites of the sand texture floating around, statically. And the side offices each had two errors in them as well.

and yeah you're right, water textures are complicated to make and to use

indeed, water must be a func_detail and cannot be hidden. I created another one in order to be converted into "water that moves" and that it seems to me it can be disabled.
last update of the water https://www.dropbox.com/s/aeh5pnc0x0ya3jd/real%20water.zip?dl=0
and you should find here a water that you can disable if i remember well
https://www.dropbox.com/s/8rw6r1lq66e5vno/Kwinten%27s%20mappack%20v1.1.zip?dl=0

kwinten
One of the downgrades you probably see in the new version is that the water has been positioned down according to the older versions. This change has also technical reasons. Because of these are expensive waters, they cannot be hidden in the way that other beach parts can be, like disabling and enabling. It has to be under the interior ground not to be visable. If I would bring it up, like in previous versions, the spaces around the chamber, where the arms retract would still make the water visable on close. As far as my knowlage goes, there's no workaround for that, unfortunatelly.

kwinten
Hey! Water_2011 was an awsome texture, but it had some technical disadvantages. I found that custom waters are glitching with skybox reflections on, when there's an env_projected_texture on the map with shadows turned on. So if I wanted the "upgrade" feature, that the water reflects the sky, as well as sun shadows, I had to change the water to a modified verson of a default portal 2 pit texture, which didn't have this glitchy behaviour.

I'm sorry for not using your texture, because I can imagine how cool is that, when you randomly notice someone using your product, that you made several years ago:]
I could bring back the water to the old version, but for me it looked kind of strange, that no waves or refractions were visable on the surface, when looking in the distance

I'm kind of happy with the resoult right now, but I'm fine with continue working on it, if I get some advice for it

only the water ! and it looks less fine than in the previous v1v2

Packing issue have been fixed, now everything should work fine

all textures and models missing in this one (use VIDE from TophatWaffle website)
i would even appreciate it more if you join a puzzle to solve with the concept, nice work !