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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
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);
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