Wall portals

[Major Cooke]

Can you make a cvar that limits floor/ceiling recursion?

An excellent idea.

Unsure what you'd do where you meet the recursion limit, though. Solid black? (Ideally, one would camtex it like Portal does. That sounds difficult in this engine, though.)

Just render the floor/ceiling as the texture its given.

[Graf Zahl]

There are no limits for floor/ceiling portals because there cannot be an infinite recursion. Remember: The height of the portal planes needs to be the same on both sides of the portal! This means it's impossible to look back into the original area and create a recursive effect.

[NeuralStunner]

Right - But for wall portals it would be possible to make a recursing connection. (One would also need to limit line-of-sight traces in some way, whether by distance or by portal passage.)

[Graf Zahl]

Wall portals obviously need a limit, just like mirrors. But the question was about floors and ceilings.

[ZZYZX]

Wall portals (&mirrors) do have a limit. r_portal_recursions. Defaults to 4.
In the current ZDoom, mirrors also have a limit, which is, again, 4. Hardcoded though.

Also once there will be tracers teleporting through a portal, they will have another limit (sv_portal_recursions, probably).
The limit was hardcoded to 4 in the old code.

[Lavender Moon]

Would it be possible to have a MAPINFO flag that disables AI seeing through portals?

[Gez]

There's no need for that until the AI becomes able to see through portals in the first place.

[Xeotroid]

I was running around in Gez's combined map (zdoomx_test0.wad) and after walking into a portal (I have no idea which one, I was lost and wandering aimlessly) the game crashed with the dying marine message. Crash report is in attachment. I'm using the prebuilt binary, by the way.

Oh, I was editing the r_portal_recursions in the console because I was getting major FPS drops. I turned it down to 1 in the Pac-Man maze and then changed to 16 when back in the main area. Maybe that was the cause of problems?

[Lavender Moon]

There's no need for that until the AI becomes able to see through portals in the first place.

That goes without saying.

[ZZYZX]

The prebuilt binary is horribly broken. And this random crash is one of the reasons why I started rewriting it. Completely no idea why it does this.

[cambertian]

This would be a really useful feature for me for a slightly weird reason.

If there's any way to randomize where the portal takes you (maybe with script,) this could be great for generating pseudo-random levels.

[Gez]

If there's any way to randomize where the portal takes you (maybe with script,)

Yes, you can change a linedef's portal link at run-time with a script (there's an example of that in the demo map) so you can make random portals.

[NeuralStunner]

Yes, you can change a linedef's portal link at run-time with a script (there's an example of that in the demo map) so you can make random portals.

Or elevators.

[woofdg79]

Any progress update? Still very interested in your work on this, and hats off to you for what you've done so far!

[Gez]

There's a pull request for visual portals that is awaiting review and merging.