Rooms and Portals example

Simple Portals Example .

Introduction

This tutorial will introduce you to building a “Hello World” room system with two rooms, and a portal in between.

Step 1

• Create a new project.
• Spatial as the scene root (on the screenshot, it’s called “Root”).
• RoomManager node. We will need this later to process the room system.
• Next we need to start defining our rooms. We create all our rooms under another Spatial we have called ‘RoomList’.
• Room node as a child of the roomlist.
• Kitchen.
• We will now create the geometry of our room. The names you give to the geometry is up to you.
• MeshInstance for the floor. Create a box by adding a CubeMesh resource to the MeshInstance. Scale and position it to form a floor.
• Create MeshInstances for the walls. Create more box meshes for this, then scale and position them. Be sure to leave an opening on one side. You will need to create two wall segments to do this on that side.

  Step 2

• Now we need to create the other room.
• Kitchen node, right click and choose Duplicate).
• Rotate and position the second room so that the openings line up.
• Lounge.

  Step 3

• Next, we will add a portal between the two rooms.
• Portal in the kitchen.
• Transform in the inspector, so it fits within the opening between the two rooms.
• outward from the source room, i.e. towards the lounge. This direction is indicated by the arrow in the editor gizmo, and portal gizmo’s color.

  Step 4

• To make things more exciting, we want to add a few more boxes to the rooms.
• outside the rooms. Provided they are in the RoomList branch, the system will attempt to automatically place them in the correct room at runtime.
• Freeform to keep things tidy.
• Boxes also have a green SpatialMaterial assigned to them to make them stand out more from the rest of the room.
• OmniLight so it will be autoplaced in one of the rooms.

  Step 5

• Next comes a crucial stage. We must let the RoomManager know where the rooms are!
• Paths section.
• Room List to point to the RoomList node we created earlier (which is the parent of all the rooms).

  Step 6

• Make sure you have saved your project before this next step. It is always a good idea to save and make a backup before converting.
• Convert Rooms. Press this button.
• room graph) to perform occlusion culling at runtime.
• You can see a log of the conversion process in the output window. This is helpful for finding problems.
• If you now move the editor camera inside the rooms, you should see the meshes in the opposite room being culled depending on what you can see through the portal.

  Conclusion

  This concludes this simple tutorial. Don’t be afraid to experiment with the new room system you have created.

  Some things to try

• Create different types of geometry. CSG nodes, Particle systems, and Multimeshes are all supported by the portal system.
• room graph must be created each time you load a level, by converting the rooms. Instead of using a button in the editor, in real games you call a function in the RoomManager to convert the level, called rooms_convert(). Try this out with a script, perhaps running within a _ready() function.
• STATIC (non-moving). If you look in the inspector for geometry nodes, you will see they derive from CullInstance. Here you can set the Portal Mode for objects in the portal system. This determines how the node is processed.
• STATIC objects are assumed not to move in the system. If you instead change the object to DYNAMIC, it should now update the culling correctly.
• portal_modes, these are described in the main documentation.
• set_portal_active() to open and close the portal.
• If you select the portal, you should see 4 handles appear. Try dragging the portal points with the mouse, and see how it affects the objects that are culled.
• Generate Points button in the toolbar, it will store the points of the room hull in the room inspector. You can now edit these with the gizmo handles.