Hello guys!
Today we're going to talk about portals!
Portals were popularized in video games by the game that is their namesake, the 2007 Portal.
Everyone knows how the portal works, you enter one place and one exit, and through the portal you can see what is on the other side.
In the game Pray (spoiler), at some point, we get a key that can destroy glass surfaces. When we approach the glass in the starting location with a panorama of the city and break it, it turns out that what is behind it is not a city, but a laboratory. From the narrative side of the game, it turns out that we were locked in the test room all the time. On the other hand, from the mechanical side, the visible city is placed in a completely different place and is only displayed on the glass, and we were physically in the room that was inside the laboratory.
For a moment I will return to the game known from previous devlogs, namely Antichamber. The whole game is twisted based on portals, teleports and wall rearranging, but here the focus is on a very specific room. At some point, you enter a room that looks like a modern art museum. There are a dozen or so boxes in this room, and their contents vary depending on which side you are looking at.
https://twitter.com/antichamber
What we created in the split, however, is a slightly different variety of portals than in Portal, and more similar to the one from Antichamber. In real life, it can be compared to a room with a Venetian mirror. When we leave the room into the open space, we actually enter another specially prepared room.
Around the Bridge there are some kind of sheets or boxes. This sheet must be applied so as to perfectly cover the view and surround the door, and at the same time not to pass through the door and other models on the stage. Otherwise it could spoil the effect of the illusion.
Without the illusion, the view from the bridge would look something like this:
Additionally, due to various types of post-processes (additional effects imposed on the camera, such as smoothing the edges or enhancing shadows), the sheet must have two layers. Without the second sheet slightly larger than the first, it would look like this:
Where are these bricks in that place coming from? They are located on the same stage as the rest of the map, however, they are far away from the place where the player himself is moving. Where there are decorations, there is a camera that reacts to how the player moves and turns. The portal model, on the other hand, marks where the image from the second camera is to be rendered.
Ultimately, we get what seems to be a contradiction to the laws of physics and space, but is in fact an image from another place, pasted in the right way.
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