No joke.

I'll show you when I've bothered to make a showcase map. As of now, I'm having some mapper's block.

I was going to experiment with this, I think it may be if the portals move relative to each other they dissconnect, I was going to try it out last night but time overcame me at 2:30am.

Am I right? to save me time
Edit: I am not right...Screens/videos/example maps or it didn't happen!

Parent daisy chain?

Does shit freak out?

can't moving portals just be like pointer variables? going to each other no matter where they are?

Instead of making a portal on a surface move, have the rest of the map move and the surface stay still.

Simple, and effective.

volt wrote:
Instead of making a portal on a surface move, have the rest of the map move and the surface stay still.

Absolutely friggin imposible with a finished map, but if you could get it working then it might just be effective. Oh wait, there are some things that can't be parented. Oh well, it was a nice idea.

Fixed

even if you could move the whole map, what if you wanted two moving portals? (not moving parallel to each other? i guess you could tear spacetime up in some extra dimensions

Yawn.

Get on with explaining it before I press the huge 'Espen is a big fat BSer' button

From listening to the developer notes, portals are 2 things:

1) A modification of the view buffer, such that when you look at a portal, you see a stencil (decal) on the surface, that just happens to be the view through the portal itself.

I would see nothing wrong with this being moving; it's just a view buffer.

2) A modification to the physics code. Pretty tricky.

Things that stick through the portal may have different gravity, etc. The physics code had to be hacked up to do this. The initial build was 500ms to calculate everything; they trimmed it down to 10ms.

At a guess, I think it's possible that MOVING portals would violate an optimization they used to get the physics calc's faster.

also, 3:

3) Paraphrased, "the player shouldn't be afraid of portals" - they deliberatly made them so that you can't get cut in half from going through a portal. If a portal was on a moving surface, and you stuck your head through at a bad time, you could be hit. So maybe they wanted to disallow this

Now, after having said all of that, Espen says he has it working, so ...

and a moving floor would obviously work and have all the attendant issues with 3). It also makes me think it would be fun to put a portal under a box while standing next to a head hight portal. Would your head get crushed? I guess so.

Time to go play

== John ==