I found this post on youtube to be very interesting... I've been watching the slow but sure progress of "portalized," the open source portal game... and its definitely interesting...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meedeHieHAE

From the explanation on the video:

Quote:
Added: January 26, 2008 (Less info)
Anyone remember that GDC 2005 "The Room" demo by Peter Molyneux? Well, he didn't release the demo. However, given that Portalized is supposed to have the most 1337 portal physics evar, real-time scalable portals were a must. And here they are, in all their glory.

Notes:
- dual-sided collisions (and thus seeing stuff on both sides of a portal) was disabled: it caused recursion bugs and other things which were not of my top priority to fix. No worries, I'll fix it and include it in the v0.5 release, but I wanted to make this video first.
- the portals are dynamically scalable in real-time via C++ or Lua. For example: http://portalized.pastebin.com/f175548c6
- this is all shot in the WYSIWYG editor. I'm not showing you any of the v0.5 gameplay , I wish to simply showcase the technology.

Credits go to Julio Jerez for the awesome free physics engine, and the Ogre3D team for the awesome free and open source rendering engine .
Category: Science & Technology
Tags:
portalized disorder engine physics library newton game dynamics portal narbacular drop portals prey valve

that was... wicked sick!

Wow amazing, this makes our dear Portal look... average! The best part was when they changed the size of the portal by putting it through a scalable portal, and also when they changed the size of the cube.

The fact that this is open source is very exciting because it means that the community can take this project anywhere they like, even to multiplayer.

Edit: BTW I couldn't find a website for Portalized. Do they have one?

Fusion wrote:
BTW I couldn't find a website for Portalized. Do they have one?

No they do not have a website. I am pretty sure it is being developed by one person.

Fusion wrote:
the fact that this is open source is very exciting...

From what have heard it is still undecided as to whether it is going to be open source. You can check its development here on the Ogre3d showcase forum.

EDIT:
I remembered that freegamer did a report on it a while back thinking it was open source but if you read the article and through the comments the author clearly states that it is not. It also has a link to another video.

http://freegamer.blogspot.com/2008/02/stop-press-portalized-open-source.html

I subscribed to nullsquared's videos......

Hmm this isn't actual scalable Portals real time, instead its a simple entity that controls the in-game scale, making it seem like the room is getting bigger. So really this is a neat trick, but its not real advanced, aside that this is Lua coding, with that you can do almost anything, so Source, can already do something much like this. Its like If I made a room, with two portals. One would go to a bigger room, while the other goes to a smaller room, its fairly simple. You could even do this with a monitor in Source, then have the player teleport to another area. So pff, this fails.

It does seem that objects can be scaled though, which is another thing Source already has too.

MrTwoVideoCards wrote:
Hmm this isn't actual scalable Portals real time, instead its a simple entity that controls the in-game scale, making it seem like the room is getting bigger. So really this is a neat trick, but its not real advanced, aside that this is Lua coding, with that you can do almost anything, so Source, can already do something much like this. Its like If I made a room, with two portals. One would go to a bigger room, while the other goes to a smaller room, its fairly simple. You could even do this with a monitor in Source, then have the player teleport to another area. So pff, this fails.

It does seem that objects can be scaled though, which is another thing Source already has too.

hm rlly? i guess if it were real you could rapidly get into major trouble after a few passes...

old old old!!!

iamafractal wrote:
hm rlly? i guess if it were real you could rapidly get into major trouble after a few passes...

Yeah eventually so much ram would be used to calculate the scale, or the engine would run out of space, either way, it ends somewhere.

hmmmmm its scary anyway to imagine shrinking and shrinking forever like that.... there was a short story, that came out in the 1930's called "he who shrank." i believe it has been made into a podcast, maybe in "escape pod." but anyway this guy keeps shrinking and he makes a transition into another universe every time he gets down to the molecular scale... it happens many times...

hm why though do you have to keep the information about all the previous rooms. can't you just cache the latest few?

iamafractal wrote:
hm why though do you have to keep the information about all the previous rooms. can't you just cache the latest few?

or if you kept the rooms simple enough. and to easily dividable (multiple) deminsions you could just have a base size and multiply or divide the size to change it. for example a *2 portal and a 128x128x128 size room. you go through and now you have a 256x256x256 or 64x64x64 size room (respectively) just an idea. then you would only need to cache 2 rooms (or 3 if you keep in cache the "initial" sized room)

but scary to think about the constantly shrinking the size of oneself... imagine a "terminal velocity" portal with a slight size difference?

I dont want to sound annoying but I am pretty sure that if you read through the Ogre link that I posted and look closely at the videos you will see that they are in fact scalable portals.
Did you see in the latest video when he through the cube through the portal and it came out smaller in the other one?
Any ways I think that once this is finished its going to be awesome no matter how it works.

Yeah thats Lua coding, Like I said, its not really scalable portals, I don't think you know what Lua is huh....?

MrTwoVideoCards wrote:
Yeah thats Lua coding, Like I said, its not really scalable portals, I don't think you know what Lua is huh....?

heavy gabba lua?

Lol, sorta, but a bit different, LUA is always advanced in different ways when using it on different engines, but the base factors are still there.

The only way I can use Lua (a scripting language, for those who don't know what it is) is by the default Lua libraries (math, stdin/stdout, etc.) and by whatever functionality I bind from C++ to Lua. Lua doesn't magically come with scalable portals and a full game engine

The scalable portals are done in real time, and they are "real". It's not different rooms, it's literally a scaled world. You can put two portals for an infinite "tunnel" effect, and each time you see through the same portal it gets smaller (or bigger, depending how your portals are set up). There are no tricks being done.

My videos are rather old by now. The engine is a lot further in development (actual game development, not just engine development) by now. Wait for the final game - we (me and Svenstaro) plan on release the final thing before Portal 2 - when, exactly, we're not sure.

ok so if you enter an "infinite loop" of ever shrinking portals..... and you walk away for a few hours... and get HOPELESSLY tiny... then what? scary.

and if you can get a little bigger... will it stop when you can't fit in a room anymore? then what do you do?

both cases seem like suicide needs to be possible!

iamafractal wrote:
ok so if you enter an "infinite loop" of ever shrinking portals..... and you walk away for a few hours... and get HOPELESSLY tiny... then what? scary.

There's a manual cap on how small you can get (a few centimeters). There is really no physics engine that can deal with sub-centimeter objects properly.

Quote:
and if you can get a little bigger... will it stop when you can't fit in a room anymore? then what do you do?

You can't get infinitely big the same way because eventually you won't fit in the portal. Know what I'm saying?

Quote:

both cases seem like suicide needs to be possible!

Heh. We have solutions to everything, my friend. Just wait for the final release .

nullsquared wrote:
Heh. We have solutions to everything, my friend. Just wait for the final release .

just like in a good book or movies i love when there are those "how the FUCK am I going to get out of that!!?!" moments.

so are you going to release a cool map editor (that blows away hammer) to go with your game?