Stanley Parable Infinite Hallway

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Stanley Parable Infinite Hallway

Postby Riomaki on Fri Aug 29, 2014 3:51 pm

How does one do an infinite series of rooms as seen in the Stanley Parable remake? Now, I'm not talking about the infinite circular hallway - that's a neat trick that TWHL had an example for. I'm talking about the "crazy ending" where Stanley continues to walk forward through a seemingly neverending set of rooms which repeat. The progression is completely forward - there's no sense that the player is walking in a circle.

I'm just going to assume (perhaps unwisely) that it's not cutting-and-pasting the same hallway a hundred times. So how was it done? Is it a fancy teleporter trick? Are they point_templating new instances of the rooms as they go? Any thoughts?
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Re: Stanley Parable Infinite Hallway

Postby Major Banter on Fri Aug 29, 2014 4:06 pm

There's an entity in Portal 2 and onwards that allows for seamless visual teleportation - it's like a quantum displacement field I guess, a seamless portal in terms of visuals and physics. It's present in the master source code that they give to developers, hence why it's in Stanley Parable. I will try to dig out the name of the entity.

Edit: I would assume it's this.

https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Linked_portal_door
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Re: Stanley Parable Infinite Hallway

Postby Riomaki on Fri Aug 29, 2014 4:19 pm

Ah, okay. Such a thing doesn't exist in stock HL2 then. But still, that's a pretty clever entity. Thanks!
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Re: Stanley Parable Infinite Hallway

Postby Major Banter on Fri Aug 29, 2014 4:27 pm

Yeah it's a damn shame - I wonder if it could be ported back to Singleplayer 2013...
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Re: Stanley Parable Infinite Hallway

Postby Smurftyours on Fri Aug 29, 2014 10:35 pm

Not necessary, you can achieve the same effect with clever usage of landmark teleports. Loads of entity work though.
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Re: Stanley Parable Infinite Hallway

Postby [KIRBY] on Sat Aug 30, 2014 2:33 am

VtmB did this in one location, transition was not the smoothest, but it got the job done
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Re: Stanley Parable Infinite Hallway

Postby Les_Grossman on Sat Aug 30, 2014 10:32 am

Smurftyours wrote:Not necessary, you can achieve the same effect with clever usage of landmark teleports. Loads of entity work though.

Not really.
Linked_portal_door gives you the possibility to see the other side of the portal. That is impossible in HL2 engines. You can make pretty smooth transition, you can even use env_monitor to fake the visuals, but it will never be so seamless like linked_portal_door.
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Re: Stanley Parable Infinite Hallway

Postby Smurftyours on Sat Aug 30, 2014 8:28 pm

Les_Grossman wrote:Not really.
Linked_portal_door gives you the possibility to see the other side of the portal. That is impossible in HL2 engines. You can make pretty smooth transition, you can even use env_monitor to fake the visuals, but it will never be so seamless like linked_portal_door.


Not true. It is completely possible to connect spaces in a similar fashion to a portal without the need of a portal. Every room just needs to have a look ahead to every possible outcome, also landmark teleports act seamlessly.
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Re: Stanley Parable Infinite Hallway

Postby Les_Grossman on Mon Sep 01, 2014 8:19 am

Good look with that :)

Try to do this then:
https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wik ... xample.jpg

Not possible
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Re: Stanley Parable Infinite Hallway

Postby Riomaki on Mon Sep 01, 2014 6:57 pm

I could sort of picture how that could work, because I wasn't aware the landmarks could be used with trigger_teleport (I thought they were strictly for level transitions). If you kept things in the world bolted down, you could probably have one duplicate room/hallway in front of the door and seamlessly teleport to the entrance of the first room upon entering the door.
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Re: Stanley Parable Infinite Hallway

Postby Smurftyours on Mon Sep 01, 2014 9:54 pm

Les_Grossman wrote:Try to do this then:
https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wik ... xample.jpg

Not possible


You're leaving the context of the original question buddy. In Stanley parable all room transitions occur through doorways which can easily be done using false rooms before teleporting to the new room.

I never said you could make portals, I said you could achieve the same goal of being seamlessly transported to randomly selected rooms through the use of clever teleportation and level design.

I suggest you go play Stanley Parable again as your memory of this area seems to have faded.
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Re: Stanley Parable Infinite Hallway

Postby Major Banter on Tue Sep 02, 2014 8:24 pm

It'd be achievable by shunting the player into a defined loop. You use a copy of the start at the end of an area to provide the visual impression of the loop, then teleporting them into a sequence of 3 of the same area.

The player effectively remains in the middle room of the three - they go forward into the visually similar area, and get shunted back to the start of the middle room. They go backwards, they get shunted forward to the end of the middle room.

I'll try to visualise it.

AREA -> ROOM TO BE LOOPED -> COPY OF ROOM

TP'd to below.

COPY 1 -> COPY 2 -> COPY 3

represents your teleports. You never actually enter copy 1 or copy 3, nor the original copy of room. They serve to simulate a loop visually.

The problem, Smurft, is that I can't think of a teleport that doesn't force the player's POV into a predefined angle.
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Re: Stanley Parable Infinite Hallway

Postby Smurftyours on Tue Sep 02, 2014 9:12 pm

Landmark teleportation can save view angles through teleportation, it is literally unnoticeable if done correctly.

Also I'm working on a concept map for demonstration. It works kinda like this
......... A
....B > C
..........D
...........
..........A
.A > C > B.....Looping
......... D
...........
......... A
....D > B
..........C
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Re: Stanley Parable Infinite Hallway

Postby Riomaki on Wed Sep 03, 2014 5:54 pm

Yeah, I did a test similar to what Smurftyours suggested. I built an S-shaped hallway segment with doorways on either end and duplicated a clone of it forward and back. In the middle S's entrance doorway, I placed an info_target and in the exit doorway, I placed a trigger_teleport and info_landmark, sharing the same origin point and pointing to the info_target.

There is a very minor hitch when the teleport occurs which probably has something do to with how I placed these, but it does basically work, preserving the angles of the player's view while forcing them to repeat the same hallway segment over and over again. Obviously, there's the caveat that it wouldn't be a convincing illusion if the player could interact with physics props in the hallway, since those wouldn't be reflected in the clone rooms. But since very little, if anything, was physics-simulated in Stanley, that wasn't a problem for them.
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Re: Stanley Parable Infinite Hallway

Postby Smurftyours on Thu Sep 04, 2014 12:39 am

You can send physics props through teleports on a landmark as well.
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