Difference between Static and Eternity-compatibly in portals

insightguy · Post by **insightguy** » Sun May 20, 2018 9:49 pm

I've recently been experimenting on mapping with portals and just want to ask, asides from the look in the automap, what are the main differences of Static and Eternity-compatibly portals in terms of use and level design?

The wiki says that there is none functionally but I've seen some people say that monster pathing works in Eternity-compatibly, is this true?

(Moved from scripting due to me not reading the subforum I'm in)

Post by **Rachael** » Wed May 23, 2018 6:28 am

Eternity-compatibility portals force the target line to portal back to the source with the same attribute, nothing more. It's mainly useful because you have room for only one arg in the Doom map format, which is what Eternity used back in the day when it was developed. So a portal pair in Eternity would just be a portal and a lineid target. And since GZDoom has some propositional support for Eternity maps, this allows GZDoom to support the same system as well. (In fact, originally, the line portal system in GZDoom was developed with an Eternity map that made extensive use of the feature)

Post by **Graf Zahl** » Wed May 23, 2018 6:54 am

The only difference is that they use different parameter setup methods to create the link. Eternity's portals had to be defined with Doom-map-format specials which can be inconvenient if you have true line args and IDs available, so they could not be mapped 1:1 to how the original submission for line portals handled this.

insightguy · Post by **insightguy** » Wed May 23, 2018 7:15 am

@Rachel and @Graf Thanks for the rundown, gives me a better perspective on things

I see, after some experimentation I see now that interactive (which I mistakenly called static) is similar to eternity but tends to be more forgiving (2 portal lines can face the same direction in interactive and not in eternity) BUT eternity has some advantages and found out through trial and error about some quirks that:

Monsters will only chase and shoot you correctly if you pass through one portal, they tend to mess up if you pass through several portals (MAP01)
Monsters will see you through eternity lines but not interactive ones (MAP01 & MAP02)
Shooting a monster though a portal will make them go towards you relative to your position on the map rather than through the portal, but can still go through the portal if they somehow path through it by accident (MAP02)

Whether that's a bug or feature, IDK

ZDoom