Have portal gun crosshair highlight when focused on a “portal”-able target?

Question

From what I remember, in the original Portal the crosshairs of the portal gun would "illuminate" when you were focused on a target that could support a portal. However, I noticed that in Portal 2 the crosshair is always illuminated. As such, it's not as easy for me to determine if I'm focusing on a target onto which I can make a portal - I have to fire the portal gun to find out.

Is there a way to turn this feature on in Portal 2?

Answer 1

I suspect that this was disabled as a work around to dynamic surfaces created by

the moon gel

As a result, portal calculations are done where the projectile hits and can no longer be automatically detected by where the player is pointing (or at least, not easily on the fly). This may be patched in the future.

However, portal surfaces seem more obvious in portal 2, with an obvious white paint on the walls and less frustrating "find the only portalable surface in this room" style puzzles. I agree that it is annoying that you can no longer "scan" the environment with your crosshairs to find portalable surfaces, but perhaps that was intentional as well.

As a general rule of thumb though, just shoot at white walls,

moon gel

and of course (ending spoiler)

the moon