Fake Portal Effect
Posted: Fri Nov 14, 2008 11:41 am
Playing around with some proof-of-concept stuff for my next project, I decided to mess around with a little fake portal effect using skyboxes and silent teleporters. I was actually able to get something pretty nice looking, albeit somewhat of a pain in the ass to implement.
The trick is a script that moves the skybox viewpoint around with the player. In this case, it simply takes the x, y, and z coordinates and adds a bit to y (the sectors are lined up on the x-axis) and z to give the proper depth effect when looking through the portal.
The only limitation is that the portal will display HOM or strange artifacts if the player's position would cause the translated values of the skybox viewer to be out of the map geometry (or inside the wrong piece of map geometry), so if you want to use this effect you'll have to set it up with care. Take a look at how I did the effect and you should get an idea of what the limitations are.
I'm sure I could do a more robust version of this with some generic ACS code along with some map spots to get the x,y, and z shift automatically. That way a bunch of portals could be set up using an array in ACS containing the TIDs of the marker spots and associated skybox things, kind of like how weatherFX tracks the weather zone markers and conditions.
Anyway, feel free to mess around with it. I have no idea if this has been done before, but I figured it'd be fun for some people to play with.
The trick is a script that moves the skybox viewpoint around with the player. In this case, it simply takes the x, y, and z coordinates and adds a bit to y (the sectors are lined up on the x-axis) and z to give the proper depth effect when looking through the portal.
The only limitation is that the portal will display HOM or strange artifacts if the player's position would cause the translated values of the skybox viewer to be out of the map geometry (or inside the wrong piece of map geometry), so if you want to use this effect you'll have to set it up with care. Take a look at how I did the effect and you should get an idea of what the limitations are.
I'm sure I could do a more robust version of this with some generic ACS code along with some map spots to get the x,y, and z shift automatically. That way a bunch of portals could be set up using an array in ACS containing the TIDs of the marker spots and associated skybox things, kind of like how weatherFX tracks the weather zone markers and conditions.
Anyway, feel free to mess around with it. I have no idea if this has been done before, but I figured it'd be fun for some people to play with.