The extent of Eternity's portals

How far can I go with portal-rendered areas in Eternity? Preferably linked portals, because I'm interested to let the objects pass them.

For example, is it possible to render a city, canyon or any large outside area with a top layer that connects all the outside sectors (I know it's possible, but how much)? And make it very-very tall, so that flying objects can be seen very far away up?

Or make a 3d void world with islands in all directions. Is there a maximum rendering distance, or portal count limit? Can I make visible geometry as far as I like even beyond (lots of) portals?

I say test the limits!

It depends on how the renderer works. If it's still all fixed point for coordinates you will have to be careful that the added distances don't become too large but considering the inherent limitations of the map format it's unlikely to get there.

I think with the ideas you have you will run into performance issues much sooner than into real map limits.

Graf Zahl said:

If it's still all fixed point for coordinates you will have to be careful that the added distances don't become too large but considering the inherent limitations of the map format it's unlikely to get there.

If you're referring to the stuff in the Doom renderer that cause lines to jiggle when you long along side them. Then no. Cardboard is a much more exact engine than any other Doom port got. It doesn't even got flat bleeding.

kristus said:

If you're referring to the stuff in the Doom renderer that cause lines to jiggle when you long along side them. Then no. Cardboard is a much more exact engine than any other Doom port got. It doesn't even got flat bleeding.

Well, flat bleeding and...sparklies or whatever you'd call those are different things. Flat bleeding is the bug-feature used for vanilla light transfers/deep water/etc. :)

But yes, EE's flat rendering is precise enough that it doesn't have sparklies around their borders like the ones seen in that RTC-3057 shot.

kristus said:

If you're referring to the stuff in the Doom renderer that cause lines to jiggle when you long along side them. Then no. Cardboard is a much more exact engine than any other Doom port got. It doesn't even got flat bleeding.

No, I mean general geometry calculations. If portals get arranged so that when factoring in the displacement between the 2 parts the distances get too large there could be overflows if fixed point is used in some part of the renderer.

Graf Zahl said:

No, I mean general geometry calculations. If portals get arranged so that when factoring in the displacement between the 2 parts the distances get too large there could be overflows if fixed point is used in some part of the renderer.

We still have a few of those lurking about. I'll probably get rid of them as they are actually found by users, similar to the Sunder MAP10 problem :) Most of the renderer is floating-point now.