{INTRO}

So, you finished The Beginner's Guide and you are incredibly fascinated by the games map design (like a normal person). You decide to go through the game's files and found out there's a folder called "mapsrc". You open these up in Hammer and you scream in horror as you find out none of the textures or models have loaded in! To a normal person, you would just suck it up and view the maps in a untextured mess. But you're not normal! You WANT to see this game's delicious looking models! In this guide, I will try to guide you through how to set The Beginner's Guide for the Portal 2 Hammer Editor.

{WARNING}

I am a dirty amateur at the Hammer editor and the Source engine in general. If you have more experience on this stuff, please feel free to give any advice on how to perform this better in the comments.

Make sure you also have Portal 2 + Portal 2 Authorizing Tools + The Beginner's Guide installed on your computer. All of those should preferably in the same drive. (Preferably in the drive Steam is installed too. I heard that makes things easier. Don't sweat if they aren't though, it is still perfectly doable to continue!) This all will be tested on OG Hammer and not Hammer++. I'm 95% sure this also works for Hammer++, but setting up Hammer++ for Portal 2 is a beast on it's own and I'm not that dedicated.

Locate the GameConfig.txt file in your Portal 2 bin folder. Set up your config like this!
Take note that I am using a different drive than steam is installed because I'm evil. To reiterate, everything should be preferably installed on the same drive that steam is installed in. If it's not, don't worry! Just make sure that each line is matched up to where things are actually located on your computer.

EX: Some of you might have The Beginner's Guide located under
"D:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\The Beginners Guide\beginnersguide"
So the GameConfig would have all the files from Beginner's Guide be under the D drive rather than the E drive.

To reiterate again, I suck at Source related stuff! Maybe this isn't efficient! Please let me know if you have this working in a better way!

You might've noticed that Portal 2 is entirely missing from the config. I'll explain in the next section.

So, for whatever reason, the OG hammer does NOT allow for you to change configurations super duper easily. For this to work for me, I had to DELETE Portal 2's config and let The Beginner's Guide be the only (or first) config present in the GameConfig.txt file. If you're working with Hammer++, it lets you change configurations on the fly. I'm not sure if OG hammer even allows that too, but it doesn't for me. So there's that.

If you set it all correctly, once you open a map file, it will show up the mapsrc folder automatically. Open any of these up and you got yourself amazing maps with most textures loaded!




MOST TEXTURES

(If you know how to fix this, lmk!)
{update: i realized that the floor in that room uses a reflective texture. im pretty sure hammer and hammer++ to an extent, can not show reflective materials in the editor cause they are too complex or something, im pretty sure you cant fix that but if you can thats cool}

‎
‎And that's the end of My Beginner's Guide. Thank you for reading and hopefully you learn something from all this, whether that's about the game or even mapping as a whole!

If you need help with how to set it up or anything related to The Beginner's Guide or Source, feel free to comment and I'll try my best to help with what I know! Also feel free to translate this guide to any other language for ease of access of mappers around the world!

10/15/23
- Made the frickin guide!

12/30/23
- Changed some sentences around.
- Added a update about reflective materials to "The Hammer" section! Oooh!