NEW portals available: lower and upper edge portals

I've made an update to Eternity which will appear on the next DRDTeam dev builds. It's about a new kind of portal. As it has been for awhile, so far we've had two kinds of portals: sector floor/ceiling portals (connecting the floor of a sector with the ceiling of another), and linedef portals (connecting the wall of a sector with the wall of another). The linedef portals have been limited to only replace the middle texture with a portal to another area. But now it is possible to replace the lower or upper texture with a portal!

Here's a motivation for adding lower/upper line portals: until now, sector floor/ceiling portals had an annoying limitation that made level editing difficult. Such a portal, described by a horizontal plane with a constant Z (height coordinate), would need to be extended to flood-fill across the whole area until being bounded by solid walls. For example if you had a huge high-detail area and wanted to introduce some multistory shelf in some corner, you had to horizontally cut in half the whole area into two floors. This resulted in massive copy-paste of details and updating each floor in the editor to look correctly. Now you can just cut that exact corner you wish to apply the multistory shelf to, using upper-edge (or lower-edge) portals bounding the ceiling (or floor) portal.

Here's an illustration. You can take a look at the general picture just to see the intended geometry of the setup. The details will be explained later in this post.


Right now, lower- and upper-edge portals (vertical lines in the figure) must be the same kind of portal as the floor or ceiling sector portal that's behind the edge (horizontal lines in the figure). It's a limitation imposed by the internal workings. But being able to do otherwise wouldn't really result in a sane level (it would just look weird and possibly glitchy), so it's no big loss.

And here's how to set it up. Right now UDMF is still not finalized and exposed (at least regarding portals); we're working to make it as user-friendly as possible. But you can still have these portals by using ExtraData. As in the figure, to have such an edge portal, the line with visible lower/upper parts has to be adjacent to a floor/ceiling portal behind it, and given the LOWERPORTAL or UPPERPORTAL linedef extradata extflag. The portal(s) behind it will be copied into the lower or upper part of the line, depending on which flags you set.

As seen in the figure, the part to the right, after the portal, is a simple sector with a ceiling portal and a regular wall portal corresponding to the lower-edge portal. Indeed, what is a floor-portal + lower-edge-portal on one side will appear as a ceiling-portal + wall-portal on the other side. In the classic Doom format, the wall-portal on the other side will be set as usual: special 376 and a tag. The same tag will be set on the linedef containing the lower-edge portal, but without a special 377 — it's already implied by the fact that it has the LOWERPORTAL extradata extflag. Right now adding a buffer sector (dark grey in the picture) is still required behind the wall portal, but this necessity will be deprecated in UDMF.

DEMO WAD HERE: Edge portal demo. It shows a line which has both ExtraData flags set. You may need to wait for the DRDTeam builds to update before this demo works.

Screenshot from the demo:

Coolest thing in the universe.

NOTE to designers: for now, you can't have stairs of portals. A LOWERPORTAL/UPPERPORTAL linedef can only be partner with a 376-type linedef.

Did the change make it into the devbuilds yet? The latest file on devbuilds.drdteam.org is from 2016-12-29, but the eternity.exe has a timestamp for 2016-12-22.

Also the screenshot you posted isn't from the demo you linked, so I'm not sure if what the demo shows with the latest devbuild is the correct thing.

I may have added the monsters and modified the position of the pillars. And maybe deleted some redundant sectors in the map, not connected to the portals. Is there anything extra missing?

Also Eternity is really going udmf. Please check the other thread. Wiki documentation will soon follow.

The file called edgeportaldemo.wad linked in the OP does not appear to actually contain a demo of edge portals. On examination in SLADE, I saw three sectors:

• Sector 0: The 256x128 ledge the player starts on.
  
• Sector 1: A 256x2176 room to the east of the ledge, with a floor portal (and a 64-unit 2S linedef with no tag and no special 256 units east of the ledge) coupled to sector 2.
  
• Sector 2: A 256x2176 room with two barrels in it and a ceiling portal coupled to sector 1; the west wall of the room has no Middle texture.
  

grommile said:

The file called edgeportaldemo.wad linked in the OP does not appear to actually contain a demo of edge portals. On examination in SLADE, I saw three sectors:

• Sector 0: The 256x128 ledge the player starts on.
  
• Sector 1: A 256x2176 room to the east of the ledge, with a floor portal (and a 64-unit 2S linedef with no tag and no special 256 units east of the ledge) coupled to sector 2.
  
• Sector 2: A 256x2176 room with two barrels in it and a ceiling portal coupled to sector 1; the west wall of the room has no Middle texture.
  

No edge portals in sight.

Have this map, ignore the polyobj portal: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/36523265/PortTest.wad

grommile said:

The file called edgeportaldemo.wad linked in the OP does not appear to actually contain a demo of edge portals. On examination in SLADE, I saw three sectors:

• Sector 0: The 256x128 ledge the player starts on.
  
• Sector 1: A 256x2176 room to the east of the ledge, with a floor portal (and a 64-unit 2S linedef with no tag and no special 256 units east of the ledge) coupled to sector 2.
  
• Sector 2: A 256x2176 room with two barrels in it and a ceiling portal coupled to sector 1; the west wall of the room has no Middle texture.
  

No edge portals in sight.

This is really comical. I don't know how that mutation came to happen. I will fix it. Mind that my example is supposed to have a classic format map.

EDIT: I used that map a year ago to test portal aware autoaiming.

Link fixed, please try again now.

printz said:

Link fixed, please try again now.

Tried again, running on latest (jan 3rd) EE build: level does not seem to work. Edge of edge portal is a wall, portal itself only viewable from above. Console says 'no anchor line for portal' for linedef 13 and 34.

Might be something wrong with the DRD team development builds, because the timestamp on eternity.exe from the jan 3rd buld is still 22/12/2016.

Mordeth said:

Tried again, running on latest (jan 3rd) EE build: level does not seem to work. Edge of edge portal is a wall, portal itself only viewable from above. Console says 'no anchor line for portal' for linedef 13 and 34.

Might be something wrong with the DRD team development builds, because the timestamp on eternity.exe from the jan 3rd buld is still 22/12/2016.

DRDTeam builds aren't building the exe, please refer to my thread with my own builds.

Altazimuth said:

DRDTeam builds aren't building the exe, please refer to my thread with my own builds.

Just downloaded your latest. Demo edge portal works now, nice.

What is not so nice: this build breaks subway setups, meaning combinations of linked portals with anchored portals. The anchored view stops working / HOMs. Going to investigate why when I have more time.

Simpler but similar anchored portal setups still seem to work.

Are the anchored portal maker and anchor lines at the same angle in your mod? Or different angles? Because if so, it means that they get bent.

printz said:

Are the anchored portal maker and anchor lines at the same angle in your mod? Or different angles? Because if so, it means that they get bent.

Always same angle / orientation.

Is your setup dependent on visual magic tricks, such as "unintended" level areas being rendered in portals? I had to make portal rendering more strict when I added the edge portals, just to avoid the infinite recursion issues that would happen.

Mordeth said:

What is not so nice: this build breaks subway setups

Solved last night on IRC: anchored portal anchor was accidentally flipped, resulting in a rotated portal.

Mordeth said:

anchored portal anchor was accidentally flipped, resulting in a rotated portal.

In the meantime, I modified the behaviour NOT to result in any rotated portals, for Doom format maps, because released maps such as Ogro Power Facility would break. UDMF format maps will rotate portals however, unless using compatibility specials such as "Sector_SetPortal".

Buuump..

The demo map links (both printz and Alazimuth's) appear to be broken. Anyone have a working link?

https://www.dropbox.com/s/5xst1swp0uwj8gb/PortTest.wad?dl=1

DROPBOOOOOOOOX.

Thanks Altaz, much appreciated.