What:

Lets Mod Portals into LT!

Why:

1. Mining: Way easier with portals
2. Combat: One portal before the enemy, one portal behind him, and watch him kill himself. Or show him into an asteroid. Or the sun.
3. Exploration: Intrasystem travel never looked so good.
4. Rule of Cool: Because we can?

The implications here would change the very nature of the game.

How:

Spawn Mechanics- One cool way to spawn portals is to have them spawn as a slow moving orb from your ship. Just like pulse lasers, but slower. As soon as the orb reaches the point where you want a portal, press a button (or hit it with a pulse laser? ) and it unwraps into a portal. The longer you press the "fire portal" button the larger the orb will be and thus the larger the portal. The portals will be paired, so you will fire two portals of the same color scheme and the color scheme of the next two portals will be different, indicating the new pairing. One could also allow only one portal system to exist(like in Portal the game), but I don't want to get into the gameplay ramifications here.

Functioning- The normal of the portal's plane would automatically be decided by your ship's orientation while firing the orb so that the portal will be facing you if you haven't moved after shooting the orb. The portal could only allow use from only one face to prevent problems, or you could color the two faces differently.For example, In a blue/green faced portal, If you shoot into the blue face it would come out of the blue face of the other portal and if you shoot into the green, it would appear from the green face of the paired portal.

Creating Limits- Portals should be limited in both their number and their size to avoid breaking the game. A portal generator could only maintain so many portals, and the limitation could function in two ways-
1. Same limit controls the number and size, so you can either have lots of small portals or a few large ones.
2. A portal generator comes with a specified fixed maximum number of portals it can maintain and fixed maximum size, these two being independent.

In both the cases, upgrading the(or buying a better) portal generator should allow for a larger limit.

This is all very rough, and I would welcome ideas. Pile on!

Isn't viewforum.php?f=28 the sub-forum for modding?

Interesting idea, sounds like it would be difficult to make though.

BFett wrote:Isn't viewforum.php?f=28 the sub-forum for modding?

Interesting idea, sounds like it would be difficult to make though.

Ouch, My mistake.

That would mean a third game has portals.... That is impossible!

AbhChallenger wrote:That would mean a third game has portals.... That is impossible!

Shit. Half- Life 3 confirmed.

AbhChallenger wrote:That would mean a third game has portals.... That is impossible!

there was a game before portal that had portals...

Cornflakes_91 wrote:

AbhChallenger wrote:That would mean a third game has portals.... That is impossible!

there was a game before portal that had portals...

There was a game before Prey that had portals...

Scytale wrote:

Cornflakes_91 wrote:

AbhChallenger wrote:That would mean a third game has portals.... That is impossible!

there was a game before portal that had portals...

There was a game before Prey that had portals...

And there was a thread before all these comments that talked about portals in LT. And got derailed unbelievably fast.

My apologies - let's get back to it~

Personally I find the idea interesting, but I wouldn't want to see it employed on a ubiquitous or otherwise large scale - I think it's something more of the superweapon persuasion. The technical limitations you suggest sound wise though.

I was wondering - instead of having portals as plane-apparitions, rather have them as orbs; any ship entering one orb would exit its paired orb with the same velocity vector. This would make the portal (more of a portal-bubble) more intuitive to use and perhaps easier to implement, given that it's now essentially a teleporter. There could presumably also be a maximum limit on the distance you could use such a system (e.g. should it work across sectors?).

Scytale wrote:My apologies - let's get back to it~

Personally I find the idea interesting, but I wouldn't want to see it employed on a ubiquitous or otherwise large scale - I think it's something more of the superweapon persuasion. The technical limitations you suggest sound wise though.

I was wondering - instead of having portals as plane-apparitions, rather have them as orbs; any ship entering one orb would exit its paired orb with the same velocity vector. This would make the portal (more of a portal-bubble) more intuitive to use and perhaps easier to implement, given that it's now essentially a teleporter. There could presumably also be a maximum limit on the distance you could use such a system (e.g. should it work across sectors?).

This is a good idea. Removes the problem of one sided/two sided portals. You shoot the orb, and when it reaches where you wanted it, you just tap a button(or hit it) and it expands. Makes so much sense to have orbs for 3d Space.

For larger vessels I would think its just great to see some sort of portal tech for redirecting incoming fire to a safe location, that would be cool and certainly has a high tech feel to it. It would be great to be able to research this sort of high end technology that could maybe result from converging the shielding and jumpdrive (or what have you) tech trees (maybe?)

However, if short range teleportation is the goal why not just flip the teleporter switch to on and select a nearby destination. Also, I highly doubt any human player would have the reflexes or timing to use a portal based teleportation mid combat, especially involving small fast ships like fighters . I mean think about all of the variables that go into (and I cringe to use the word, because dog fighting was used in wwi before aerial combat was well understood) a dogfight, its hard enough just to slip into the guns envelope, get your shot, and maintain situation awareness. I just cant see it being used for anything other than maybe making a random gate just to get you out of the line of fire of a bandit on your six.

This would be a fun mod to try tho, will LT support this kind of mod?

HoratioScumdog wrote:For larger vessels I would think its just great to see some sort of portal tech for redirecting incoming fire to a safe location, that would be cool and certainly has a high tech feel to it. It would be great to be able to research this sort of high end technology that could maybe result from converging the shielding and jumpdrive (or what have you) tech trees (maybe?)

However, if short range teleportation is the goal why not just flip the teleporter switch to on and select a nearby destination. Also, I highly doubt any human player would have the reflexes or timing to use a portal based teleportation mid combat, especially involving small fast ships like fighters . I mean think about all of the variables that go into (and I cringe to use the word, because dog fighting was used in wwi before aerial combat was well understood) a dogfight, its hard enough just to slip into the guns envelope, get your shot, and maintain situation awareness. I just cant see it being used for anything other than maybe making a random gate just to get you out of the line of fire of a bandit on your six.

This would be a fun mod to try tho, will LT support this kind of mod?

Some good points here. Selecting a nearby destination to teleport to will be a problem , since every pixel on the screen represents an infinite number of co-ordinates(that go away from the player). Though one could arrange for teleportation to planets/stations/asteroids, basically all selectable objects. Wait, doesn't josh already have that as a dev tool?
The use of portals would be
1. In setting up a mining business in factional gameplay
2. Escaping dogfights, as you suggested. (Though teleporting would also work here)

Also, this is kinda off topic, but is the movement lock on you ship on the planet surface hard-coded into the engine or subject to modification? It would be so cool if mods could allow ships to run over the planet surface. Cool uses like Trench runs and races await.

Vartul wrote: Also, this is kinda off topic, but is the movement lock on you ship on the planet surface hard-coded into the engine or subject to modification? It would be so cool if mods could allow ships to run over the planet surface. Cool uses like Trench runs and races await.

Nothing but the physics engine (and maybe the rendering engine) is hard coded now. So trench runs, planet side tank battles, races, or anything else should be completely possible to mod into LT.

Vartul wrote:The portal could only allow use from only one face to prevent problems, or you could color the two faces differently.For example, In a blue/green faced portal, If you shoot into the blue face it would come out of the blue face of the other portal and if you shoot into the green, it would appear from the green face of the paired portal.

We could also have single bi-sided portals.
They would have one face in semi-transparent violet glow, and another in semi-transparent yellowish glow, and when you enter the violet face, you exit on the yellow one. And vice-versa if you choose the opposite way.
This is a lot simpler to implement in a mod and would add sooo much to gameplay.

You could program in a size vector to a portal.

Upon firing the portal you realise something is wrong, where half your ship is not being transported to your destination.

After reviewing your purchases, you realise the portal bubble (PB) was meant only for a smaller ship than your current behemoth.

You envisage the entertainment module of your carrier is wondering where the rest of the ship is, 10 sectors away.

:facepalm: