Sector portal questions

[Guest]

Hi all, I'm wondering what the state of the art is with portals in gzdoom. I have a building on a map with one room over another, made using two sector portals. That building is itself contained inside of a larger sector; an "outside" area. There is a window in the upstairs room looking outside, and I've been trying to make it work properly.

Simply not assigning a middle texture on the window's sides (of course) fails, because it's still really a wall - you can't shoot through it, and looking up from the lower room's portal through the upper room's window shows its missing mid-texture as a black stand-in in gzdoom.

The obvious thing to try would be to make one of the upstairs window's lines into a line portal, facing outside from the inside. And this does nearly do the trick; it's possible to see outside properly, and shooting outside works fine. However, shooting into the inside does not work. Monsters can see the player inside on the second floor, but their shots just hit the other side of the portal's line as though it's a solid wall. I'm not even sure if it's possible to make it a two-way portal, given the setup; naively playing around has only caused gzdoom to lock up as monsters track the player.

Is this an avenue worth exploring any further, or should I just bite the bullet and make the outside area have an upstairs and downstairs sector portal which matches the ones on the inside? That does work, but I'd like to make a really sprawling map, and worry I'll hit the map size limits pretty easily. I'd also like to avoid 3d floors, as they are not easy to work with as the level geometry gets more complicated (especially with line triggers, sloped 3d floors that aren't aligned 90 degrees to the grid, and automap management, among other things).

Thanks in advance for any insight! Also, as a side question: do type 5 sector portals actually work? I'm not sure what they're actually supposed to accomplish. What does it mean to "copy a sector portal to a line"? They seem to do nothing when I play around with them.

[Kappes Buur]

... sloped 3d floors that aren't aligned 90 degrees to the grid

That is where boris's 3D Sector plugin comes in handy,
or even for 3D sectors in general.

[LiveAndLetDoom]

Ah, oops, I somehow managed to post without being properly logged in.

... sloped 3d floors that aren't aligned 90 degrees to the grid

That is where boris's 3D Sector plugin comes in handy,
or even for 3D sectors in general.

Agreed, but I don't have a Windows machine handy. I'd even be willing to mess with plane equations if Slade supported them (adding them as custom UDMF properties was... painful, and didn't seem to work as I would expect).