Practicing tricks with the help of a portal

[g0vn0r]

A portal, which can be thought of as a programmable one-way teleporter, is an unsupported item in QL. Yet it can prove useful to ease the practice of tricks, as demonstrated in this demo.

The desired map needs to have cheats enabled, so it should be loaded with the devmap command. Then:

dmflags 28
bind p "give portal"

Once the portal is acquired, the +button2 command, bound to the middle mouse button by default and better known as "Use Item", has to be used twice:
- first, to position the Arrival point of the portal
- then, to position the Departure point of the portal

As soon as the second point has been set, the portal can be used. Each point has a 2 minutes lifetime. When the two points have vanished, the portal can't be used anymore and needs to be acquired again.

Notes:

- The points both look like a colored 3-axis corner: screenshot1 and screenshot2

This aspect is only a consequence of the item being unsupported: no graphics are available to display these two points as "doors".

- This 3-axis thing tends to flicker or even to disappear, so the Departure point should be set near something as a reminder, e.g. under the lamp, in the demo.

- As with any teleporter, there is an inherent forward movement when going out of the Arrival point. This is why this point should not be set too close to an edge.

- By causality, the Arrival point vanishes before the Departure point, so there is a period near the end of the portal's lifetime when traversing the Departure point leads to "nowhere", and this would show as a telefrag if dmflags 28 was not used. The god command can't be used as a substitute to dmflags 28 to fix this peculiarity.

[edit]

- The dmflags 28 fix has an annoying side effect, though. Traversing the Departure point when the Arrival point has vanished causes weapons to lose their knockback. This knockback quirk has no consequence if the trick to be practiced is based on strafing and circle jumps. But if the trick involves rocket jumps, grenade jumps or plasma climbing, then it gets impossible to perform afterwards, unless the map is reloaded with devmap.

- This zip file contains 3 extra demos:

ztn -> plasma climbing to RA
dm17 -> from SG platform, rocket jumps to RA and to mega
dm17 -> from SG platform, jump to MG ammo

The second one shows the effects of the knockback quirk at the end, and the third one shows that the portal remains effective when the player gets killed.

[TheMuffinMan86]

Ah yes, I've forgotten completely about the portal. As an added bit of info, this was present in the code since Q3TA.

It'd be an interesting addition to QL if they polished up the code and gave it models and sounds. It could work well in FFA!

[g0vn0r]

It'd be an interesting addition to QL if they polished up the code and gave it models and sounds.

Well, anchor points last 2 minutes only. I'd welcome a cvar to control this timeout instead of a hardcoded value, to begin with. Yeah I'm biased...

It could work well in FFA!

It would work even better in... CTF ^^
muhahaha

[KittenIgnition]

you could prolly import the models/sounds/etc. from TA and use them offline.

[g0vn0r]

It occurred to me that for the sake of practicing tricks, there is a more elegant and less troublesome way than using a portal. Thanks to the cheat-protected command setviewpos, it's possible to teleport to a specific spot in a given map. Binding the command to e.g a mouse button is handy, so that teleporting can be done in a click

For example, to practice b2r as in the first demo, this bind suffice:

\bind mouse3 "setviewpos 0 -1000 564 0"

To generalize this to other map locations, the viewpos command should be used first, in order to retrieve the coordinates of the return spot.


Note: if you don't use an autoexec.cfg, remember to reset the mouse bind to what it was previously before ending the practice session, i.e:

\bind mouse3 "+button2"

if you use the default "Use Item" mouse bind.

[crucci]

Hey, that works perfectly. Makes practice a lot faster

[g0vn0r]

Makes practice a lot faster

Yep that's the purpose

[sponge]

The portal wasn't included in TA either, no model exists currently. It's a bit buggy too, can get stuck in walls and such.

[m0zahh_]

and how to get this cordinate over the maps?

EDIT: sry

To generalize this to other map locations, the viewpos command should be used first, in order to retrieve the coordinates of the return spot.

[TheMuffinMan86]

The portal wasn't included in TA either, no model exists currently. It's a bit buggy too, can get stuck in walls and such.

Well TA did have the item model:

http://i744.photobucket.com/albums/x...n86/portal.jpg

Which is a pity since that's a perfectly good model and a great concept gone to waste.

Another problem with it is that it records not only horizontal angle but your vertical angle too, so if you're looking at the floor when you lay down your portal destination then you will be looking at the floor when you teleport there, which shouldn't happen.

I tried to add a simple model as the portal source (models/powerups/teleporter/tele_enter.md3) but the game doesn't pick it up since the models don't register (hence the lack of shader/model errors in the console when using it in a game).

Since it functions as an actual portal and is vulnerable to being destroyed, it should also have the reward of being able to teleport flag carriers in ctf with the flags intact. Plus there obviously needs to be sounds added. Doesn't seem like too much work to get it right, and it could have quite interesting applications in gameplay. You guys should think about adding it in future Imagine the possibilities.