Hover Turret
| “ | Hey, what's goin' on over there?
— Hover Turret
|
” |
The Hover Turret (also referred to as Lazer Turrets) are unused turrets from Portal 2. Despite the name, they do not actually hover, but are suspended by a cable from the ceiling. When they spot the player, they attempt to kill them by firing a blue laser at them.
Their only known official appearance is in the leaked July 2009 build of the game, where they appear in the last two chambers of the Mixup course as well as the unused Turret course. In this build, they use the model of the cores from Portal (switching between the individual cores based on their state) and are voiced by Valve animator Richard Lord, who would notably provide placeholder lines for Wheatley later in development.
Functionality
Hover Turrets hang from a tether attached to the ceiling. In some chambers, they slowly rotate while idle and have a bright spotlight attached to their eye which follows said rotation. Like the standard Sentry Turrets, Hover Turrets are initially inactive until a player enters their field of view.
Once a Hover Turret spots a player, its eye will turn yellow and it will aim towards them while speaking a voice line. At this point, its targeting laser will disappear; it is supposed to be replaced by a thicker blue beam, although this is broken by default. Despite this, the beam still deals damage, hurting (and eventually killing) the target that it touches in a manner similar to a Thermal Discouragement Beam. Unlike a Thermal Discouragement Beam however, a Hover Turret's laser does not push the player and cannot be used to activate Thermal Discouragement Beam receptacles.
Once alerted, Hover Turrets will track the player relentlessly, only returning to idle if the player completely loses line of sight to the Hover Turret or dies. Unlike the standard turrets, Hover Turrets cannot see players through glass.
Hover Turrets will break off of their tethers if enough force is applied to them, either by being hit by an object or the player grabbing them directly. If picked up, they can be carried and will not fire their laser. Once the Hover Turret is dropped or if it was knocked down without being grabbed, it will explode into futbol chunks after a brief countdown.
The code for Hover Turrets remains in the final game, and they can be spawned using the cheat command ent_create npc_hover_turret or placed in custom maps through Hammer. However, all of their assets have been removed, so they will appear as blue "ERROR" placeholder models and will not function by default.
Trivia
- The Hover Turret's voice lines are all reused from the "Two Bots, One Wrench" experiment.
- While the original model is missing from the files, a fan-made patch can be downloaded that restores most of the NPC's functionality, although it is not correctly configured to aim vertically.[1]
- The Hover Turret's tether is a unique entity known as
ent_hover_turret_tether, it is generated automatically if the hover turret has an attachment target set in Hammer. - The Hover Turret produces glass futbol chunks when exploding.
- A trio of Hover Turrets appear in an early test intro cutscene for Portal 2. They can be heard having the following exchange: "Hey, what's going on over there?" "I didn't see anything!" "Why am I not surprised?", all of which are voice lines that Hover Turrets can actually speak in-game in the 2009 build.
Gallery
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See also
Notes
- ↑ ModDB Hover Turret Fix accessed 27 March 2016
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