Thanks to lawl, tipster extraordinaire and pirate aficionado, it's come to my attention that you can actually play Half Life 2 in all of its glory with both the gravity and portal gun as two seperate weapons. Go ahead and vacate your anal cavity of all bricks at this point.
The guys at Primotech have spent a lot of time messing around with the .gcf files and miscellaneous game components in hopes of being able to export characters and voice into other games, and along the way, they realized that it was also possible to export weapons across Valve games. While shoddy copy protection on Valve's part, the ending song makes up for it entirely. Seriously guys, its hard to overstate my satisfaction with this. Look below for a video along with an explanation of how to do this.
Thats easy! Just use the instructions below!
So you’ve played through Portal and loved every minute as much as we did. Maybe you’ve even gone through the advanced maps and tried out some of the challenges? So what comes next?
How about the ability to play through Half-Life 2, HL2 Episodes, or other Source-powered games with the portal gun in-hand? We’ve been doing that very thing for the past few days now, and after hours spent experimenting with various techniques and tricks, we’re here to show you how.
Now, follow our instructions below to the letter and you’ll be firing your gravity gun through portals at unsuspecting Combine in no time.
First off, backup up your entire Portal directory in a safe place. It’s the folder marked ‘portal’ in ..\Steam\steamapps\(your_steam_id)\. We, nor Valve, take any responsibility in the unlikely event of you hosing your game files. Worse comes to worse though, you could always just redownload.
Next, download and install, if you haven’t already, GCFScape. This handy program will allow you to access the cached game files for any Source-powered game, in addition to several other Steam games you may have downloaded.
Once that’s done, browse to the directory ..\Steam\steamapps\. There, you’ll see all the available GCF archives. We’ll start with Half-Life 2.
Open the GCF marked ‘half-life 2 content.gcf’ You’ll see a directory tree in the left pane. Click the box to the left of the folder marked ‘hl2’ to see the directory listing contained within it. Then, right-click ‘maps,’ select ‘Extract’ and extract the entire folder into the directory \Steam\steamapps\(your_steam_id)\portal\portal. This will merge it with the existing Portal map folder.
Do the same with the ’scenes’ folder
Fire up Steam and run Portal. When it’s done doing its thing, open up the developer console with ‘~’ (you may need to enable it under your keyboard options).
At the console, type ‘maps *’ to list all the available maps. Now that you’ve imported the Half-Life 2 maps, this will be a fairly lengthy list and some of the names, like citadel and canals, should seem familiar.
Type ‘map’ and then the map name to open that map. For instance, ‘map d1_canals_01’
When the map is done loading, pull up the console again and enable cheats by entering ‘sv_cheats 1’
To give yourself all weapons, including the portal gun, enter ‘impulse 101’
Depending on how far you got in Portal, you may need to upgrade the portal gun to fire both portals. Enter ‘upgrade_portalgun’ to do so
Go lay waste to some alien scum with the power of portals!
Here are some more thoughts on our experiences:
Follow the same steps if you’d like to try it out with Half-Life 2: Deatmatch or Episodes 1 and 2.
We actually highly recommend starting with the HL2: DM maps to give you a feel of how things operate and allow you to experiment with various techniques. You can spawn an enemy by first looking where you would like him to be placed and then entering, say, ‘npc_create_equipment weapon_shotgun; wait; npc_create npc_combine_s’ to create a Combine soldier with a shotgun. (Visit this HL2 Filefront page for more details)
Sorry, but we’ve racked our brains and can’t figure out a simple way to get multiple people into a game of HL2: DM this way. We’re sure some enterprising group of modders will come up with something in the coming weeks, though.
We did not attempt to do this with Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike: Source, or Day of Defeat: Source. As fun as it might sound in theory, we would like to dissuade you from trying it as well, as it probably won’t yield any real satisfactory results.
All the same basic concepts of Portal apply here, including realistic momentum and gravity. You’ll also automatically regain health very quickly as in Portal. We’ll try to find a fix for this and post it soon.
It may take some time to figure out which surfaces work and which don’t, since obviously this is no longer clearly indicated by the textures. Generally speaking, shoot only for flat walls, floors, and ceilings and not objects like rocks or boxes.
Sadly, NPC’s and enemies cannot pass through portals. However, almost all ammunition, from bullets shot to grenades tossed to objects flung with the gravity gun, can and will make their way through smoothly.
You’ll also probably notice a weird, floating colored cloud that follows you around (it appears a few times in the video above). We couldn’t figure out a way to disable this, but thankfully it’s only a minor annoyance.
In Layman's terms: speedy thing goes in, speedy thing goes out.
Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! I've been talking to by friend about how awesome it would be to use the Portal gun in Half-Lie 2. Man, I'm really tempted to buy the Orange Box for PC now even though I already own the Half-Life 2 Game of the Year Edition.
Last night I actually created my own Portal map too...can you say...hundreds of weighted companion cubes everywhere!!!!! Not to mention loaded a few Counter Strike maps in the game!
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Seriously though, that looks awesome. Too bad I never play computer games.
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but it is a lie.
(# 22) on 10/18/2007 18:13
Last night I actually created my own Portal map too...can you say...hundreds of weighted companion cubes everywhere!!!!! Not to mention loaded a few Counter Strike maps in the game!
Also, cake.
Also, also, lies.