Portal polyobject announcement

[printz]

I'm posting this to tell you that the polyobjects with linedef portals leading into inner "chambers" (thus acting as vehicles) are still a bit of a young feature, subject to changes.

 

As of now, they used to move all the things inside them together with them, so if you had a cacodemon or plasma shot inside such a platform, it would be moved in the same direction, even if no force appeared to be applied on them. This has changed on latest DRDTeam builds to make the floating things always relative to the main ground, as if the carrier was anything else without portal trickery. And, even if I haven't tested it, I hope that nested portal polyobjects would act like expected regarding this thing velocity control.

 

Another change: now the polyobject portal inner layers will appear in the automap normally, not dark grey. They're rarely ever used to overlap the other floors of the map, and it's probably more interesting if they don't give themselves away in the map before moving.

 

Right now their movement is still jerky, until I implement portal rendering interpolation.

 

It's also possible they may still have visual or (worse) gameplay issues. They will be important to be fixed.

 

Finally, please never overlap linedefs for any reason! I saw a sample where the author overlapped an elevation change linedef with a portal, just to achieve the lower and upper textures seen from outside the poly. You don't need that! Just put the upper and lower textures on the 1-sided line from the polyobject exterior, which will become the portal. I'm thinking of adding some prominent warnings if author does stuff like this.

Edited November 20, 2018 by printz