Well, examining the portal trailer frame by frame, it would seem that John was correct in his assumption. The portals seem to be dynamically sized render textures (much like the water refraction and reflection render textures) with entity "shadow copies" being created as they pass through the portal. My guess is the portals have a special collision routine to allow objects to pass through them in the first place, and the model instance is copied (much like the way ragdolls are perfect copies of the player's model instance) and rendered at the opposite portal until the object's origin passes through, at which point the object and the shadow copy are swapped.
This isn't done for players though, if you look at the first part of the video with the spikes, you can see the player running through the portal as he approaches it, as soon as he touches it the player jumps through and appears on the other side. My guess is thats because copying player models with all the attached animations is too complex for the entity shadow system. On the second ingame part, where they drop a box on the turret, you can clearly see that the box copy created on the top portal is very dark (lighting origin is still inside the wall) and then as soon as the swap happens the bottom box turns very dark. There is also a one frame gap where the actual swap happens where the top box disappears. The recursive rendering seems to render entities and world on the first portal but only the world on the second portal (up to a limit of 5 or 6 I would guess). I say this because while the player runs in circles around the portals, if you look 2 portals forward, the player clips the wall. That's pretty much all I can say about that. Good luck to all the portal clones. On 8/1/06, Chris Harris <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
-- [ Picked text/plain from multipart/alternative ] They made Narbacular Drop, I doubt they had problems doing it and meeting a deadline. On 8/1/06, Charles Solar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > -- > [ Picked text/plain from multipart/alternative ] > If I was coding portals as they apear in the video, I would atempt a > 'wormhole' type design. Where the portal actually connects those two > walls > in a way so that the player can walk into a portal just like he was > walking > through a regular door. > But thats me, who knows what valve would do, I dont think they would goto > the extent of creating another copy of the map, but I wouldn't put it past > a > few guys who are struggling to meet a deadline. :) > -- > > _______________________________________________ > To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, > please visit: > http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlcoders > > -- _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlcoders
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