Portalized (GUI update)

nullsquared · Post by **nullsquared** » Sat Nov 24, 2007 3:28 am

Haha. It's my dream to work as a professional game programmer... especially if it's for Valve, haha!

Either way, I'm a 14-YO middle-schooler. There's pretty much no way for me to get any job what-so-ever, even though I so want one

...

Post by **Praetor** » Sat Nov 24, 2007 5:15 am

Thinking in the long-term isn't always a bad thing... I hope employers down the road value a project like this highly. I know I definitely do.

nullsquared · Post by **nullsquared** » Sat Nov 24, 2007 6:47 pm

I did a new movable portals video. Shows more possibilities. For example, throwing an object into a portal is the same thing as throwing a portal onto an object - a concept never before explored.

dazKind · Post by **dazKind** » Sat Nov 24, 2007 6:57 pm

Haha, nice work!

This makes me remember the old 1998 e3 trailer of Prey:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSFxiuID1TY

Into the trailer at ~0:45 you can see a portal in a rotating structure(damn, what's the name of this). You should create something like that too and have boxes shoot out of the rotating portal!

broli · Post by **broli** » Sat Nov 24, 2007 7:08 pm

dazKind wrote: in a rotating structure(damn, what's the name of this).

I believe it's called a gimbal.

Epimetheus · Post by **Epimetheus** » Sat Nov 24, 2007 7:20 pm

I love this!! This is like the most incredible thing since... well since Portal!

I see whole levels designed around moving around two portals instead of shooting them and stuff

If you put on some better models and textures you can mesmerize even non-3d-geeks with this

ptmc2112 · Post by **ptmc2112** » Sun Nov 25, 2007 12:46 am

agi_shi wrote:
nitesh201 wrote:portal itself is phenomenal but this game requires new adjectives
Wow, thanks

BTW, I've perfected dynamic portals. You can hold them, through them around, rotate them... do pretty much anything you can with normal objects. I've disabled portals going through portals because that would... break the universe (I've actually got a really humorous "game over" message in there, you'll have to wait and see ). They still work, and for some reason are smoother than wall portals... well, they can't be smoother than perfectly smooth, so let's just say that they are just as smooth.

Check the first post for a video.

here is a video of someone using gmod (I think, as I haven't played Portal) to answer it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHN9oIyRUME

Another thing, you should put a texture on the back of your portals just so people won't lose the portal if it's on the ground facing down, as I've said in the comments for this video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiAJCnRAoA4

nitesh201 · Post by **nitesh201** » Sun Nov 25, 2007 1:28 am

this game grows so much where almost every day you release another update. if the idea of portals was your unique idea this game would probably have been bought by a big company by now.

nullsquared · Post by **nullsquared** » Sun Nov 25, 2007 2:57 am

ptmc2112 wrote:
agi_shi wrote:
nitesh201 wrote:portal itself is phenomenal but this game requires new adjectives
Wow, thanks

BTW, I've perfected dynamic portals. You can hold them, through them around, rotate them... do pretty much anything you can with normal objects. I've disabled portals going through portals because that would... break the universe (I've actually got a really humorous "game over" message in there, you'll have to wait and see ). They still work, and for some reason are smoother than wall portals... well, they can't be smoother than perfectly smooth, so let's just say that they are just as smooth.

Check the first post for a video.
here is a video of someone using gmod (I think, as I haven't played Portal) to answer it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHN9oIyRUME

Another thing, you should put a texture on the back of your portals just so people won't lose the portal if it's on the ground facing down, as I've said in the comments for this video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiAJCnRAoA4

Or, you can watch my video (find it under "user videos"). Sure, it's not flashy, but it's real in-game footage (no, it doesn't crash).

Also, I totally wish I could program when I was like... 4. Heh, that'd give me just the edge, lol

PolyVox · Post by **PolyVox** » Sun Nov 25, 2007 12:18 pm

agi_shi wrote:Also, I totally wish I could program when I was like... 4. Heh, that'd give me just the edge, lol

So when did you start? I took my first C course at about 15/16 and from then on was self taught. I was 21 or so by the time I wrote something impressive (CSG/BSP/PVS compiler). I'm obviously gonna have to make sure my kids (when I get some) learn to program before they can walk!

Aquatix · Post by **Aquatix** » Sun Nov 25, 2007 1:08 pm

make sure my kids (when I get some) learn to program before they can walk!

"Hey there, son! It's your birthday today, and look what daddy got for you - this beautiful buggy program. You can spend the whole year trying to fix it, and for your next birthday daddy's going to give you some Linux kernels to fix!"

PolyVox · Post by **PolyVox** » Sun Nov 25, 2007 1:57 pm

Ha, well I do remember my primary school had a (yes, one) BBC Micro with a turtle attached. You programmed it in Logo and could make it move around the classroom (and draw stuff on the floor!). Don't see why the same concept couldn't apply to a buggy!

[Edit:] Looks like you can still get them! http://www.terrapinlogo.com/roamer-turtle.php. Well I know what I want for Christmas

P.s. Sorry, this has gone a bit off topic. But, um, I'm sure you could throw them through portals. Or something.

nullsquared · Post by **nullsquared** » Sun Nov 25, 2007 2:06 pm

I was 10 when I started, IIRC. The closest I got to a real "game" in these 4 years has been Crazy Pong (info on devimg if it's still up) and now this. Oh, and a complete SDL wrapper (scrolling text, normal text, multiple viewports, animated images, etc.), but then I didn't use it for anything.

Aquatix · Post by **Aquatix** » Sun Nov 25, 2007 2:24 pm

Ahhh, sweet memories... Turtle... Logo... Although, the funny thing - when I first came across turtle, that was in my early high school (don't ask why we had turtle for IT, might be the teacher had hard enough time trying to get it to work:)), and all I could think of was to make it draw some simple 3D. Not the most efficient way, I could only get 2-3 FPS

.
For me primary school times are associated with Pascal (yes, that comforting blueish screen on a huge CRT monitor with a ball mouse and a loud keyboard).

Looks like you can still get them! http://www.terrapinlogo.com/roamer-turtle.php.

Damn it, I'm getting it! Forget Ogre for now...

P.S. I'm sure it is a must for a portals system to have a turtle. Even the main character must a turtle. A turtle, that likes programming with Pascal. More specifically, a turtle, that moves around in weird line, tries to program in Pascal, and has a little Atari gadget. Ye, that would rock!

P.S.S. @agi_shi that's some great progress over there! From pong to portals... wow!

nullsquared · Post by **nullsquared** » Sun Nov 25, 2007 3:21 pm

Aquatix wrote: P.S.S. @agi_shi that's some great progress over there! From pong to portals... wow!

Yeah, it does sound kind of stupid

. "So, hey, what'd you do before portals?" "Meh, you know... Pong..."

Aquatix · Post by **Aquatix** » Sun Nov 25, 2007 4:46 pm

Actually, that's an idea - play a pong game through portals (i.e. each player only has half a table, and the portal stands right at the end of the table. So, once the portal is closed, you are playing with empty space. Should be funny

)

planaria · Post by **planaria** » Mon Nov 26, 2007 1:54 pm

i saw you needed modellers for this project over on gamedev and wondered if that is still the case.

i can do modelling animation normal mapping etc ..

ArchAnemone · Post by **ArchAnemone** » Tue Nov 27, 2007 2:39 am

I like the part at the end of the newest video where you use the portal to scoop up the blocks and they fall out of the ceiling. Pretty cool. : )

It seems a little odd for the portals to have mass (be affected by gravity), but it got me thinking about how you could do that in a game and have it make some kind of sense... and what I'm thinking is, if you put frames around them you could make them be how "mirrors" work in your convoluted gameworld. Maybe some kind of magic makes the mirrors act like portals instead... and you can pick up the mirrors and move them around.

Anyway, I like the idea of really scaling things based on the size of the portal... that would be really cool. (But it seems like it might be a little difficult...?)

Virion · Post by **Virion** » Tue Nov 27, 2007 5:54 am

Just curious, is it possible to use shapes other than a quad?

nikki · Post by **nikki** » Tue Nov 27, 2007 3:07 pm

This is getting better and better! Can't wait to see what it finally turns into...

Post by **Praetor** » Tue Nov 27, 2007 7:49 pm

Love the progress. You are making some really great technology here. I'm pleasantly surprise how quickly to lept ahead of the current state of the art. Keep going!

nullsquared · Post by **nullsquared** » Tue Nov 27, 2007 9:40 pm

Virion wrote:Just curious, is it possible to use shapes other than a quad?

Yup. Not sure if I mentioned it, but:
- the portal "view" is just a usual Ogre .mesh (no normals/edges/etc. need to be exported, only the vertices and indices)
- the portal "fall-through" is just another usual Ogre .mesh (again, just vertices and indices)
- the portal shape when physically moving around is a convex hull of the "fall-through" hole
That's it. You can make star portals, circle portals, ellipse portals, anything. And they'll work without any difference on the performance. Heck, you can use this to optimize an immobile grid of portals (last time I checked, no one tried to open a grid of 50x50 portals, heh, with this optimization, it'll all be counted as one portal).

And, yes, I will make a frame and stuff for the portals. They won't necessarily have it the whole time, though, since you can use portals as ordinary "holes" in the map - you won't want a border or anything there. Right now I'm just focusing on the important stuff.

Thanks for the nice words, everyone

As for leaping ahead of the current "state of the art" - there is one problem. While things can go half-way through a portal (and even stack in a completely stable manner), they can never collide on both sides of the portal. This is simply impossible with dynamic portals. For things to collide on both sides, you need a unified portal system (Portal's "bubble" physics thing in the commentaries). However, a unified portal system can not be freely moved, as it needs to sample geometry around it. Thus my minor draw-back. Oh well, the advances far surpass this small loss.

Post by **Praetor** » Tue Nov 27, 2007 9:42 pm

You mean while an object passes through a portal it cannot collide with an object one side and another object on the other at the same time?

Aquatix · Post by **Aquatix** » Tue Nov 27, 2007 10:40 pm

If I understand correctly, then what agi_shi is talking about is the fact that unlike the visible geometry, physics can only be tied to one side of the portal. In other words, say if you have a portal in the wall, and it is leading to a portal in the ceiling, than you will notice, that in order to start falling down (from that ceiling) you would have to completely pass through the first portal. This is hardly noticeable, except for the cases when on the other side there is some obstacle, and you may start "passing though" it.

@agi_shi: good progress indeed. was on gamedev lately, noticed your posts there. Hah, some funny comments indeed, but I'd suggest you ignore most of them and don't respond (but was funny to read guys arguing about things they have no idea of

).

nullsquared · Post by **nullsquared** » Wed Nov 28, 2007 12:57 am

Praetor wrote:You mean while an object passes through a portal it cannot collide with an object one side and another object on the other at the same time?

Yup. I'm sorry if it's disappointing, but I had two choices:

1) unified portal system (aka Portal's little "bubble" around the portals) - the advantage being, dual-sided collisions. However- as you heard in the Portal commentaries, for a portal to be created, it takes time (10ms in the final release, IIRC). Then the portal cannot be mobile, since it'd need to be "recreated" at each position, resulting in a major slowdown.

2) my system. Stuff will poke half-way through a portal, and it stable at exactly 0.5 distance through the portal. You can stack things perfectly, as well. Yet, it won't collide on both sides. The advantages, however, are innumerable.
- 0ms "creation" time (it's just really a setPosition() and setOrientation())
- completely arbitrarily linked portals (A can lead to B, B can lead to C, C can lead to D, and then D could lead to itself, such that an object dropped into A results in an infinite bounce through D)
- dynamic portals (as seen in my videos, portals are so flexible that you can physically simulate them as physics objects and have them *still* work perfectly). This also allows a portal to fall onto an object and have it shoot out the other portal (velocity is preserved, no matter whether it's the object going into the portal or the portal going onto the object).
- any shape portals, with correct pass-through - note how Portal's unified system uses a rectangle, even though you "see" an ellipse. I'm guessing this is due to the "geometry cutting", making an ellipse (or any other shape) would be too costly. Given that my portals use just an Ogre mesh for the shape... well, you can use any shape. You can even switch them at runtime with a 0ms performance hit (you'd want to pre-cache the mesh with a load() call before hand, though, so that the portal doesn't need to load the mesh from disk)

Thanks for understanding, Aquatix

. Glad to see there's some people on my side, hehe. Some programmers there like to dissect statements and turned my "I get more iterations in Portalized than in Portal" statement into "lolz I just pwned valve lolz !!!111!11one", pretty much, and started bashing at me about it rather than focusing on the game itself (and note how I wasn't showcasing the rendering technology, but more-so the portal functionality

)

Big Note: Please note, however - I DO have a concept idea of recreating the dual-sided collisions with the benefit of my system. This is not the final release, and if I get my math right, you may just get the benefits from both systems in Portalized. I cannot guarantee you that it will work, but I will not say that it won't. Keep your fingers crossed

. IF, and only IF, this works, then... I'll officially do my "v4lve g0t pwned" dance, as inappropriate as it is, me being a major Valve fan

.

Ogre Forums

Portalized (GUI update)

does this project still need modellers?