"Daniel Menard" wrote:
Well, examining the portal trailer frame by frame, it would seem that
John was correct in his assumption. The portals seem to be dynamically
sized render textures (much like the water refraction and reflection
render textures) with entity "shadow copies" being created as they
pass through the portal. My guess is the portals have a special
collision routine to allow objects to pass through them in the first
place, and the model instance is copied (much like the way ragdolls
are perfect copies of the player's model instance) and rendered at the
opposite portal until the object's origin passes through, at which
point the object and the shadow copy are swapped.
This isn't done for players though, if you look at the first part of
the video with the spikes, you can see the player running through the
portal as he approaches it, as soon as he touches it the player jumps
through and appears on the other side. My guess is thats because
copying player models with all the attached animations is too complex
for the entity shadow system.
On the second ingame part, where they drop a box on the turret, you
can clearly see that the box copy created on the top portal is very
dark (lighting origin is still inside the wall) and then as soon as
the swap happens the bottom box turns very dark. There is also a one
frame gap where the actual swap happens where the top box disappears.
Just what I said. The player 'just' gets teleported.
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