Portals (update: v0.23 - MOVABLE portals!!!)

[agi_shi]

UPDATE: version 0.23:
Movable portals! Must see video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiAJCnRAoA4
You can pick them up, through them, rotate them... manipulate them just as you would a normal object. And they Just Work (tm).

UPDATE: version 0.20 preview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtO0jLN-4yo&feature=user
(must see)

Disorder is a physics puzzle game involving portals and various other physics puzzles (such as gravity flipping, etc.)

Wouldn't be possible without NewtonGD

v0.09: http://youtube.com/watch?v=1cAM2hKX0LI
Current is v0.1_alpha. Watch some of the other "user videos" for a bit of better quality footage, though they are older. The farthest you should go with that is "Disorder Physics Fun" and "Disorver v0.06 Portals". Any other videos (exluding v0.09, of course) are too old.

(yes, the project is still in progress, and no demo, yet - it'll be open source once release - I'm the one programmer and I have 2 modelers that seem to have forgotten about this project due to being over excited with Portal )

Enjoy

[Julio Jerez]

wow you have made lot of progress.
At first I did not undertand what was going on, but now I see it is just one room, and we are seeing you tough teh door on anoteh room.

very cool.

I edit your post to remove the reference to other engine.
we prefer to avoid comment involving other engines. It is better to just try doing the best we can possible do.

[agi_shi]

wow you have made lot of progress.
At first I did not undertand what was going on, but now I see it is just one room, and we are seeing you tough teh door on anoteh room.

Yeah, it's like the games Portal (commercial game by Valve) and Narbacular Drop (student project that got its whole team hired by Valve for Portal). Except this is being made by a mini-team (1 programmer, 2 modelers) from scratch (well, not entirely scratch, obviously, since I'm using various libraries, but the whole game engine is made from scratch). If you want, you should watch one of the Portal trailers to get your head wrapped around portals, it can be quite confusing at times. It's got a nice little "intro" that shows the concepts really well. Or, you can download Narbacular Drop. Same concept, smaller, of course, but free. In the end, Disorder will be free and open source.

very cool.

Wouldn't be possible without NewtonGD I can only imagine what kind of crazy physics stunts will be possible, especially with the upcoming NewtonGD version...

I edit your post to remove the reference to other engine.
we prefer to avoid comment involving other engines. It is better to just try doing the best we can possible do.

Alright. I was just saying how awesome NewtonGD is

[Leadwerks]

Do you render the portal area to a texture and then draw that on the wall?

[agi_shi]

Do you render the portal area to a texture and then draw that on the wall?

No way man, that's not hip . That's what Narbacular Drop does. RTT portals do not allow:
- totally random shapes
- recursion (see into a portal, see itself through itself, and again, so on)
- anti-aliasing
And they take a crap-load of memory.

Thus, I did it the Valve Portal way - through the stencil buffer. I actually came up with this method on my own, but then Portal came out and totally whipped everyone's attention to themselves as if they are the sole creators of this awesome technique. Oh well. Anyways, these awesome stencil portals:
- allow anti-aliasing
- allow extreme recursion (oddly enough, I could recurse with my portals 150 times, while with Valve's portals only 9 times before I hit a slow-down - hahaha)
- allow "correctness" when recursing (portals are not the "camera-at-a-tv" effect)
- allow any shape

Oh BTW - the portals can be free-placed. It just so happens that "shooting" them onto a wall works the best for the audience - floating portals confuse them too much.

And no, I'm not writing up a paper on these portals. They'll highly more advanced than the Narbacular Drop portals, and in technology quite similar to Portal's portals. Just wait 'till I hit release and do it open source.

[bmsq]

That looks fantastic! How did you integrate this with Newton?

I was looking into doing this, but could quite figure out how to pull this off reliably... Creating a second object when touching the portal and then syncing the two using a joint was the only way I could think of doing it.

Unfortunately, I couldn't get it to work correctly when ignoring contact points behind the portal. Care to share how you have accomplished this? It looks REALLY good!

Can't wait to see a finished product (and some source ), keep up the good work!

[agi_shi]

That looks fantastic! How did you integrate this with Newton?

I was looking into doing this, but could quite figure out how to pull this off reliably... Creating a second object when touching the portal and then syncing the two using a joint was the only way I could think of doing it.

Unfortunately, I couldn't get it to work correctly when ignoring contact points behind the portal. Care to share how you have accomplished this? It looks REALLY good!

Can't wait to see a finished product (and some source ), keep up the good work!

Objects never collide on both sides, even though they are duplicated. You'd need to do some kind of unified space system, like Portal's "bubble" physics around the portals, to have collisions synced on both sides. However, there's a very good side to this. Portal creation takes pretty much 0ms, since all you do is place the portal via a standard NewtonBodySetMatrix(...) call. Portals do not alter level geometry, and can be free-floating or sticking to the walls. Or both. They don't care. If you have a floating portal and a big stack behind it, you'll never get the stack to fall no matter how hard you throw things into the portal. This also means you can have portals of any shape or size (at least with my implementation - the shape is nothing but a model). Another thing is that stuff can "stack" right in the middle of a portal in a very stable matter, even though they only ever collide on one side, as so:


Current version is 0.11_alpha, and I plan on doing a demo around 0.5_alpha... the destiny of this project is open-source-ness (and free of course), but not until release.

I'd like to share ideas and stuff, but I'm going to leave it up to you. TBH, I had a lot of fun implementing this baby without any guidance.

Tip: make use of Newton's continuous collisions via the material callbacks, dot products to see what side of a plane a point is on, and Newton's fast point distance function.

[agi_shi]

Update (first post).

[Stucuk]

Have you tryed the "wall walking" thing pray has? Them ramp things that go up walls.

[agi_shi]

Have you tryed the "wall walking" thing pray has? Them ramp things that go up walls.

Yup. That's what my gravity flipping does. If you want to have it done on it's own, you'd need:
- a smooth "ramp" thingy
- a trigger
It's all done via the map.

[Yezide]

Just saw the 0.20 update, very impressive!

Don't u get a headache when devloping it though?

[agi_shi]

Just saw the 0.20 update, very impressive!

Don't u get a headache when devloping it though?

As for a headache... lol. Some things can indeed get very confusing. For example, since you can't just print out the stencil buffer, you need to keep aiming in the dark and hope you got it all right for the end result.

[Yezide]

Just watched 0.23 now. Impressive stuff there too!

Would it be possible for you to color the edges of the portals so you can see which one connects to which?

And also, would it be possible to drop a portal on a physical object and making it teleport in that way?

[agi_shi]

Just watched 0.23 now. Impressive stuff there too!

Would it be possible for you to color the edges of the portals so you can see which one connects to which?

And also, would it be possible to drop a portal on a physical object and making it teleport in that way?

Yeah, I will eventually get to the "effects" .

And, yes. Watch the video again around 1:40, IIRC.

[belfegor]

Impressive video.

I wish to throw up just watching it.

Belfegor.