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Examining Portal's Teleportation Code
Gamasutra is running a story deconstructing the mechanics of Portal's teleportation programming. They present a snippet of Portal's code and a downloadable demo. They ran another article in this series earlier this year with an analysis Mario Galaxy's unique take on physics. We've discussed the development of Portal in the past.
"Teleport mechanics in video games are nothing new. Puzzles from the original Gauntlet were memorable -- and more than likely, that wasn't the first game to use teleportation as a gameplay mechanic. The difference between Portal and all those that came before it is that Portal's teleportation acts as a frictionless tube between point A and point B. Physics are still hard at work inside the frictionless tube. Instead of simply repositioning an object from point A to point B, the player enters point A with full velocity and exits point B with the same speed, but moving in a new direction."
Update: 8/26 at 19:37 by SS: Dan notes that the code was not directly from Portal; it was written to approximate Portal's physics.
Your mom has a frictionless tube.
First post?
Regardless it's a lot better than quantum teleportation.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
But... can they telefrag?
I just love the sound of 2 bodies trying to occupy the same space at the same time in the morning... or afternoon... or evening...
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
>>Physics are still hard at work inside the frictionless tube. Instead of simply repositioning an object from point A to point B, the player enters point A with full velocity and exits point B with the same speed, but moving in a new direction."
Should be "Speedy thing goes in; speedy thing comes out."
I want to see the nautical version, Porthole.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
The code is a lie!
Ok, sorry...
When you shoot a mime, do you use a silencer?
Speaking of, whens he gonna put a new album out?
Porting Portal's portal code?
It didn't answer the main question for me: How does the code which accelerates players downwards work?
It must be using some kind of vector mathematics for mapping acceleration onto velocity, and velocity onto position, but I'll be damned if I can figure out how they expressed that in an algorithm.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
We need a Pratchett based online FPS! Dwarf Bread for weapons; you can play as a Gollum; Discworld based physics.
That would be super-sweet!
I mentioned tinker-toys once in a post - now I'm modded down for life.
Dwarves on Discworld don't fight golems. They fight trolls. This is why the internet needs more dwarves.
If only we could fall into a woman's arms without falling into her hands
multi-hundred pound canon
Omnianism has loads of holy books, but I don't think even those collected amount to several hundred pounds.
Speaking of, whens he gonna put a new album out?
Are you talking about M.C. Escher who designed the crazy staircase house? Or David Bowie, who lives there?
The enemies of Democracy are
I got a great blow-job last weekend. It was like she was making out with my dick.
It was wonderful.
And when you were done, did you type 'afk' and light a cigarette?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
velocity is the correct term. even though the moving object changes direction within the 3 dimensional space, the vector value must be retained in relation to the plane of the original portal and translated to the plane of the new portal. don't feel bad; as an engineer, i'm accustomed to correcting physics majors on such topics.
Sooo... Speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out?
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
Didn't Asteroids have prior art on this..? :)
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
+1, Touche.