Anchored portal problem

[Mordeth]

Today I went back to put the finishing touches to a level, which has been using anchored portals to create roofs over certain structures. And discovered it wasn't working now.

Consider this level. With ee33110w you can see the portal ceiling over the 'building', and you can look on the roof when standing on one of the pillars. But with any of the recent versions of Eternity (including ee3.33.02-win32) you get HOM when trying to look at the roof while standing on a pillar.

Do I need to do something different now? Or is this a bug that only got noticed now?

Not being able to look down on the roof pretty much eliminates some of the uses anchored portals had :/

[SoM]

Mordeth, I'm not sure why this has changed, but it's probably the fact that I WAS treating portal ceilings a lot like ceilings with f_sky on them... try applying F_SKY to the ceilings with portals assigned to them. I'll have to look into this.

[Lüt]

Oh SoM you're still around? Fix all the slime trails in anchored portals that have come up since v3.33.

Oh and good work getting solid structures un-HOM'd :D

[Bloodshedder]

<Quasar`> Millennium people are complaining about slime trails in portals
<SoM> Quasar`: tell them to build their nodes
<Quasar`> I have no idea why or what or who beyond that
<SoM> full build
<SoM> that goes away with a full bsp build
<Quasar`> SoM: o_O
<SoM> if you do a fast one for some reason it causes slime trails
<SoM> dont' ask me
<SoM> I have no idea why that happens
<SoM> I had lots of trouble with that in lavafactory
<SoM> until I realized that all I had to do was a full build

[Mordeth]

SoM said:
Mordeth, I'm not sure why this has changed, but it's probably the fact that I WAS treating portal ceilings a lot like ceilings with f_sky on them... try applying F_SKY to the ceilings with portals assigned to them. I'll have to look into this.

When changing the ceiling textures to F_SKY, the HOM indeed goes away.

[EDIT]

Some more experiments done. Turns out you only have to change the ceiling textures of the small surrounding tagged sector around the 'building' to F_SKY to get rid of the HOM. Best of all: you don't see actual sky that way, due to the tag.

[EDIT-2]

Ok, I've been able to fix everything by using F_SKY as a ceiling on critical sectors. I don't think this is worth "repairing", as it's not a problem as long as you know what to do and it won't restrict you in your designs at all. Just a mention in the docs ought to "fix" this issue ;)

[EDIT-3]

Just mentioning: I've never seen slimetrails on anchored portals like Lüt describes. But then again, I always do a full nodesbuild before testing.

[EDIT-5]

Sigh. Well. Got the same problem with anchored floor portals... but this doesn't let itself be fixed like described above :/

[SoM]

Yeah, I need to figure out a way to denote to the engine that anchored portals should behave this way because that also means when it's time to make mobjs pass through them, the engine needs to assume that lower and upper wall portions are being considered portal regions :\

Maybe they'll be fixed by the next version if I can muster up enough ambition (life has been sucking up all my time as of late)

[Lüt]

The reason I point it out is because loading the exact same WAD in 3.31 "removes" the slime trails entirely, so I figured it was the engine and not the nodes. AFAIK all the nodes are fully built (in fact if they weren't I don't think they'd work in 3.31), but I'll try rebuilding them with different programs to see if anything changes in 3.33.

SoM said:

Maybe they'll be fixed by the next version if I can muster up enough ambition (life has been sucking up all my time as of late)

You too? What's going on?

[SoM]

Lüt said:

The reason I point it out is because loading the exact same WAD in 3.31 "removes" the slime trails entirely, so I figured it was the engine and not the nodes. AFAIK all the nodes are fully built (in fact if they weren't I don't think they'd work in 3.31), but I'll try rebuilding them with different programs to see if anything changes in 3.33.
You too? What's going on?

Well, work has slowed down for me, but now my roommate is moving out and I have to find a new appartment, which will translate to more money for rent each month. My band is also taking tons of my time; as of friday night we will have played 3 shows in the last two weeks. It's fun, but draining on my time and energy.

The problem has something to do with the seg rejection code I added to make it possible to do all the crazy shit portals can do now. I don't know exactly why but doing quick nodebuilds yeild the bug but when I do a full bsp build it goes away (I had this problem with OPF) I'm trying to figure out why this problem is. Maybe I can fix it...

BTW, you guys might see a new Eternity wad from me eventually (keep fingers crossed)

[Quasar]

If the problem is slime trails, it might be an off-by-one boundary at the edge of the portal window, where a post isn't getting clipped and is thus running down, just like when an open seg causes a normal slime trail.

This is just an idea based on pure programmer's intuition, however. It might be way off but is worth checking against ;)

[Lüt]

SoM said:

Well, work has slowed down for me, but now my roommate is moving out and I have to find a new appartment, which will translate to more money for rent each month. My band is also taking tons of my time; as of friday night we will have played 3 shows in the last two weeks. It's fun, but draining on my time and energy.

Ugh, yeah I know how that goes. I'm trying to find a roommate by April because living solo is wasting way too much money.

SoM said:

The problem has something to do with the seg rejection code I added to make it possible to do all the crazy shit portals can do now. I don't know exactly why but doing quick nodebuilds yeild the bug but when I do a full bsp build it goes away (I had this problem with OPF) I'm trying to figure out why this problem is. Maybe I can fix it...

Would be nice. If not, small price to pay I suppose.

[SoM]

ok, I remember why I disabled treating ceiling portals as skys. The problem is when you try to make two-sided portals, if the ceiling portal is set to the sky texture the game will crash if you look down into the floor portal. I don't remember exactly why but it has something to do with the ceiling height being fucked with by the sky code... Oh well...

[Quasar]

Uh oh :(

[Mordeth]

SoM said:
I don't remember exactly why but it has something to do with the ceiling height being fucked with by the sky code... Oh well...

Still, the workaround for ceiling portals (see above) works without imposing any architectural limits. However, the same does not apply for floor portals. So, something is handled different here, and it would REALLY help if that can be solved...

As it stands now, the player's viewpoint can never get below the tagged sector's floor height, or you'll get HOM / other problems.

Unless I'm missing something here..?

[Joe]

Odd, in my experience using f_sky1 for the ceiling/floor of a portal's anchor sector screwed things up royally.

[Mordeth]

Anyone been able to do a floor portal which allows the player's viewpoint to go below the actual floor height? I don't want to waste precious editing time to reinvent the wheel here. SoM..?

[SoM]

Mordeth said:

Anyone been able to do a floor portal which allows the player's viewpoint to go below the actual floor height? I don't want to waste precious editing time to reinvent the wheel here. SoM..?

Not yet. as far as I can tell the doom engine never made this possible for sky textures on floors so this would have to be special-coded.

[Mordeth]

SoM said:
Not yet. as far as I can tell the doom engine never made this possible for sky textures on floors so this would have to be special-coded.

"But it worked before". One of the most hated comments a programmer can get, ahem :)

But...

Imagine the things we designers can do with this!

[SoM]

Mordeth said:

"But it worked before". One of the most hated comments a programmer can get, ahem :)

But...

Imagine the things we designers can do with this!

hmmm it may have worked before but I had to disable it because it caused crashing if you try to make portals 2-way.