Linked Portals in Action

[Quasar]

[Guest]

Good stuff.

[YMB]

Now you're thinking with portals.

[CodeImp]

Sexy! Now if only the cyberdemon (and any monster) could actually see and attack the player through the portals...

[printz]

Awesome. Do top-bottom linked portals work, too?

CodeImp said:

could actually see and attack the player through the portals...

If bullets could pass through portals, I don't see how BFG tracers, Archvile attacks, lines of sight or lines of activation wouldn't. They're probably the same material. The challenge is to make a link between the monster's field of view and what's beyond the portal.

[myk]

I see why it's called Eternity now; you can make halls through which things can travel forever!

But yeah, if it doesn't allow monsters to see targets through these new constructs, there's still some way to go.

[CodeImp]

printz said:

If bullets could pass through portals, I don't see how BFG tracers, Archvile attacks, lines of sight or lines of activation wouldn't. They're probably the same material. The challenge is to make a link between the monster's field of view and what's beyond the portal.

You can tell from that movie that the cyberdemon doesn't see the player, because it walks by very often and doesn't attack (especially considering it should see the player in 3 locations through portals). It is continuously in sight for at least one of the "players" for half a minute or so and should have attacked several times already.

[Vegeta]

Good stuff, very interesting.

Imagine a deathmatch map with this.

[esselfortium]

Yay, my map ^______^

CodeImp said:

You can tell from that movie that the cyberdemon doesn't see the player, because it walks by very often and doesn't attack (especially considering it should see the player in 3 locations through portals). It is continuously in sight for at least one of the "players" for half a minute or so and should have attacked several times already.

Yeah, the code for monsters to be able to see through portals doesn't exist yet. It'll be there when linked portals are finished and in an official EE release, though.

Vegeta said:

Good stuff, very interesting.

Imagine a deathmatch map with this.

I'm actually planning this for at least one of the maps in spacedm6, an Eternity deathmatch wad :)

printz said:

Awesome. Do top-bottom linked portals work, too?

http://sl4.startan3.com/screens/dm4/newshots/etrn130.png
http://sl4.startan3.com/screens/dm4/newshots/etrn132.png
http://sl4.startan3.com/screens/dm4/newshots/etrn134.png
http://sl4.startan3.com/screens/dm4/newshots/etrn136.png
http://sl4.startan3.com/screens/dm4/newshots/etrn137.png
http://sl4.startan3.com/screens/dm4/newshots/etrn138.png
http://sl4.startan3.com/screens/dm4/newshots/etrn145.png

Yes. :)

[Butts]

damn those linked portals are insane

and that is a sexy map, esselfortium

[exp(x)]

Portals > Slopes

[printz]

Telefrag proof? Hitscans are to work properly?

With portals like these a new mapping style could emerge.

[esselfortium]

Currently, you can telefrag things through them, but that's just because that part of the code isn't finished yet. It'll be fixed before they're in an official release of EE.

Hitscans and projectiles work properly, you can hear through them, etc. Once all the other aspects are worked out, the end result will be 100% seamless, impossible to detect movements in and out of portals. :)

[exp(x)]

This feature could really give odamex an edge over skulltag and zdaemon since the GPL prohibits their use of the code.

[DaniJ]

I totally agree with those screaming "portals > slopes", portals are infinetly (geddit?) more useful in 2.5d DOOM.

Awesome work guys.

EDIT:
esselfortium, that is one of my most favorite dm maps ever (or it really looks like it at least)!

[Edward850]

I smell a "falling for ever" trap!
Something tells me I should start making maps for the Eternity engine. Imagine the power of linked portals. You could make those *'Impossible maps' with no bugs.

*'Impossible maps' are maps, which have map routes that seem impossible to even exist, such as 2 staircases (1 going up, 1 going down) that both head to the same room.

[esselfortium]

Ehh....not quite. In order to do the crazy stuff in the video, I sort of hard to trick it into working. Linked portals are designed to only connect things that can realistically be connected, so they do lots of consistency checks. There is another type of portal in the planning stages, though, that would be able to do what you're thinking of.

EDIT: But yes, you should. Everyone should. Go do it.

[Udderdude]

You could make some seriously mindfuck Doom maps with this.

[printz]

Yes yes yes, but having the automap spoils all the mystery. If you do map with mazing portals, it'd be better to make all linedefs undetectable by the automap.

[esselfortium]

No, they actually overlay on the automap correctly.

[Edward850]

Well I guess all we need is this finished and released by December 25th and we’ll have our selves a merry little Christmas :D

[Mordeth]

BTW, how was this video made/recorded ?

[esselfortium]

Mordeth said:

BTW, how was this video made/recorded ?

I believe Killingblair used Fraps to record it. He had some difficulty getting it to recognize EE as a running game, but he somehow figured it out. I don't know how, so ask him I guess.

[Quasar]

To get EE to be frappable (?), you need to run in fullscreen, and make sure that Eternity is using the DirectX SDL video driver. There are two ways to accomplish this:

1. The easy way: Put -directx on the command line as a parameter to Eternity.

2. The less easy way: From the same command window you're going to launch EE from, do:
X:\>set SDL_VIDEODRIVER=directx

Now, if you want to do this and at the same time not suffer extreme lag every time the game does a palette flash, you need to upgrade to the latest SVN build of EE and also specify "-8in32" on the command line. This parameter activates what is right now just a hack to put Eternity in a 32-bit graphics mode and translate the 8-bit graphics on the fly. This is NOT 32-bit rendering, so don't get too excited. It will look the same, it just runs a little slower in terms of full FPS and doesn't suffer screen-tearing or palette lag due to what seem to be bugs in SDL's use of DirectX.

[Vegeta]

Aha! So this is what David Copperfield used.

[printz]

How long will it take before ports like ZDoom make their own portals by looking at Eternity?

[esselfortium]

Well, ZDoom's stacked sectors were an attempt to do the same thing, but they were given up on and left in a very unfinished, limited state.

[CodeImp]

AHA! So it is ZDoom's idea! Eternity is just the first sourceport that makes a really flexible implementation ;) I wonder how long it will take before it is actually complete, including proper line of sight through portals, is there an ETA?

[Lüt]

printz said:

How long will it take before ports like ZDoom make their own portals by looking at Eternity?

It already does, but as far as I hear from people trying to use them, they're quite weak, frustating to implement and easy to break.

[Quasar]

Actually nobody in this community can claim portals as their sole idea. Portals as a rendering concept have been around at least since Build engine, and probably a lot longer than that (I doubt Ken Silverman invented them; he probably got the idea from somewhere, just as Carmack got BSP from extant computer science literature).

I myself had the idea of using the silhouette of a line or visplane as the clip window of a BSP-rendered scene many years ago, a long time before I ever thought it would be viable. I didn't think anyone would actually ever do it, and I knew I certainly didn't know enough to make it happen.

Then SoM came along :)

Also please keep in mind that if ZDoom and its derivatives want to implement this, they're going to need to do it from scratch. We've not given permission for any EE code to be used under BSD license. And I'm really looking at the multiplayer ports that are closed-source when I say this, as they could take whatever they wanted and no one would be able to verify where it came from. If linked portals popped up in such a port in short order, I would be highly suspicious. It has taken a couple of years to get them to the point they are now at, including all the work on basic non-linked portals that has to be done first.