It doesn’t appear to be using any new techniques we haven’t seen before. My guess would be that there is a giant, nearly-invisible glass wall with a door in it, and slightly-transparent parts making up the interior of the Tardis. Then, all you need is a script that fully hides all the interior parts if the camera is on the wrong side of the wall. This is what the tardis-like portal in the upstairs of Club Raven is doing, and places where you can apply it are limited. It’s not a general-purpose portal solution for a number of reasons:
Parts with even 0.02 transparency are significantly more costly to render than opaque parts.
Large glass walls, even at 0.99+ transparency have shadow issues at various render quality settings, and can be seen if your world isn’t dark/night/space.
Parts with 0.02 transparency have big depth-sorting problems. If you build an elaborate place that’s all not-quite-opaque, some things will look sorted wrong or inside out. Very glitchy.
Cost of duplicate geometry is similar to the VPF portal, in that if you intend to teleport players when they pass through, you need a copy of whatever they can see through the portal. Otherwise, you have to do a lot of workarounds to make players not able to see or hear players who are on the other side of the portal.
As I was saying it doesn’t take the same approach as Ego due to viewport limitations but the dude went silent on me so sadly we may never get to see under the hood and find out exactly how he approached it. I haven’t given up though.
Let me know if anyone wants this. Soon I’ll be modifying it to teleport assemblies (not models, not GetConnectedParts, but entire systems with constraints and etc.)
@Manelin wdym exactly? If you want that terrain is visible through the portals then this is currently impossible, Roblox not support this feature for now. We not exactly knows why, but for now it just was so.
why it’s not available or why they won’t make it available? as for the former, we certainly know why; if we can’t clone terrain into VPFs, we can’t render it. easy.
@Frqstbite I don’t know, I don’t have access to the viewport, so I don’t know how exactly the whole thing is rendered. But what I do know is that Roblox Terrain uses a voxel system. So in other words there are no vertexes (like in parts, meshparts, etc…) but gridposition, an occupancy system and so on. Vertexes work fine in viewport frames, but a voxel based object… I think Roblox would have to change the SmoothTerrainSystem or ViewportSystem completely, so this would cost a lot of money (energy, money, time, etc…) and this won’t take 1 month or 1 year, but surely much more. Unless we create a plugin ourselves to prevent this problem, I don’t think it’s really possible. I hope it was clear enough (and this is just what I think, of course it can have completely different reasons. To get a perfect answer I would simply ask a person who worked on it himself, like zeuxcg (I don’t want to pin him on for something you might be able to solve without him, don’t want to be banned…), these (in plural) can surely give you a very precise answer).
if meshes can be rendered, it could be done by the engineering team for sure, although slowly because its porting an entire system, let alone an api for scripters to use it. in short: its possible and will probably come eventually, but its not in high demand afaik.
also, to put stuff in a VPF, you have to clone the parts and put it inside. it doesnt just render whats in the world, it renders what you give it.
I think that they should make a “Render View” object; They can easily do this.
All that is required is ray casting and rasterizing. If Roblox can render the client onto your screen, then Roblox can easily render a scene onto a part. Of course what I mean by easy is that it is still very complex, it is just well within their capabilities. This will not hinder performance as no base part is cloned; it is only rendered on a specific area.
Unity has a similar function as well; I am not asking for a “Portal” object, just a Render View gui object that can either be placed within the gui, surface gui, or billboard gui.
Of course, with the render view object, alot of math will have to be applied to reach a “Portal” effect.
But this can support lighting effects, terrain, etc. without adding or creating new base parts or even cloning terrain/verticies.
I do not say creating a new “Object” as the language used is c++ for the engine which has its OOP “Objects”
Unity has no such thing, they just have the ability to make textures at runtime. And then render those textures on part faces, though they do have access to a rasterizer i believe
