Ivvty-PortalPreview icon

PortalPreview

See where a portal leads: a 3D view of the destination inside the frame, lit for its time of day, with true parallax, a spiral reveal and smoke along the edge. Wooden, stone and modded portals. Client-side.

By Ivvty

CHANGELOG

Changelog

1.3.6

  • Version bump only; mod behavior is unchanged from 1.3.5.

1.3.5

  • With shader reconstruction, portal opening and closing use a fixed mesh and animate the spiral in the shader, avoiding per-frame CPU clipping and mesh uploads. The camera-image fallback clips only the moving boundary and shares vertices in the revealed interior.

  • Deferred teleport captures no longer load their archives while running around a hub, avoiding eviction and repeated loading of scenes needed by visible portals.

  • Cache cleanup preserves all blobs in a revision when a referenced file is locked, missing, corrupt or truncated. A complete scan verifies every reachable blob before deleting unused files.

  • Water masked out by a hull no longer replaces the scene's reconstruction depth, in either central captures or views from the observer.

  • Deferred texture copies survive archive reloads and restarts. Snapshot updates set to Once still request recovery captures for incomplete archives.

  • Portal frames with opaque and transparent materials on the same renderer can be measured correctly; transparent opening effects and their bounds are excluded from the silhouette.

Scene image refreshes still add rendering cost, especially while moving around a portal hub. This release reduces overhead; it does not eliminate the FPS difference between enabled and disabled previews.

1.3.4

  • Fixed a dark cut at the distant panorama boundary with Shader reconstruction enabled: all captured views now apply the same panorama fog.
  • Portal views captured with a texture pack that was later removed (or added) load quickly and show grass properly.
  • Saving a portal scene no longer interrupts the cleanup of old ones, and the cleanup no longer blocks a save.
  • The distant landscape in portal views is hazed like the game's own instead of pale and blue; each portal's scene is captured again on your next visit there.
  • Water in portal views is the game's own water, with reflections of the scene around it.
  • Reflection updates are spread across frames to reduce frame-time spikes; the previous reflection stays visible until its replacement is complete.

1.3.3

  • Fixed about a minute of stutter two minutes after entering a world with many saved portal scenes.

1.3.2

  • HD texture packs: teleporting could freeze the game for minutes and get you disconnected from the server. Saved scenes are also several times smaller.

1.3.1

  • Download is about a megabyte smaller: unused shader variants removed. Nothing else changes.

1.3.0

New

  • Portals of other mods show their view too; the mod measures each one's opening from its frame.
  • Portal atmosphere: a little of the far side's mist, snow, embers or dust drifts out of an open portal.
  • Moving weather: rain and snow move inside outdoor views.
  • Dry under roofs: floors inside houses no longer look wet in rain.
  • Sharper at an angle: better texture detail in oblique views.

Smoother

  • Torch and fire shadows in a view are drawn once instead of on every update: up to 41% faster near bases.
  • Optionally, what the portal's opening cannot show is not captured (Hidden geometry; on for Low and Medium).
  • Cheaper reconstruction, better capture coverage and smarter refresh order at the same quality.

Settings

  • Sorted into sections: General, Portal views, Effects, Quality, Snapshots. Your values are moved automatically.
  • Portal atmosphere, Moving weather and Hide game flames and fog are on by default; the latter now also hides the sparks drawn into the opening.
  • New: Portal atmosphere density, Hidden geometry, Limit archive blob size.

Fixed

  • HD texture packs (8K textures): portals showing one got no view.
  • Some repeated objects gained shadows they should not have.

Updating

  • Replace the DLL with the game closed. Each view is captured once more on your next trip through its portal.

1.2.0

Views look more like the real place

  • Water now looks like the game's water: its own colours from the shore to deep sea, reflections of the trees, shore and sky around it, and lighting for the time of day. It used to be a pale grey sheet.
  • Ambient occlusion: views get the game's soft shading in corners and under foliage (with SSAO on), so they no longer look brighter and flatter than the place itself.
  • Mistlands: trees, Yggdrasil roots and logs, and anything built of Yggdrasil wood near a portal now appear in the view instead of as a flat picture far behind.
  • Stepping out of a portal: it already shows its view when the loading screen lifts, instead of opening a few seconds later.

Smoother

  • Much less stutter: views are captured under the teleport loading screen instead of while you walk around, and captures are about twice as fast. The first visit to a portal can keep the loading screen up a little longer.
  • Lighter on the GPU: less work and video memory while you move near portals, especially on the Low and Medium hardware profiles.

New settings

  • Snapshot updates (replaces Capture mode): WhenChanged (default) updates a view when you leave through the portal and something around it was built, removed, grown or dug; EveryTrip updates it on every trip; Once keeps it until frozenportal refresh. Your old choice is carried over.
  • Preview quality (High / Medium / Low / Auto): how often a view is redrawn as you move. Medium and Low cost less on weaker graphics cards; the picture stays sharp.
  • One-sided view: show the view only from the side travellers come out of.
  • Portal hubs: hardware profiles show more views at once (Low 2, Medium 4, High 6, Ultra 8).
  • Resolution, Max visible portals and Max resident snapshots can now be set one by one on top of any hardware profile (0 follows the profile). Custom is no longer needed; if you used it, your values are kept.

Fixed

  • The barrier of a shield generator at your base showed inside portal views.
  • A wooden portal seen from behind had a gap between the view and the frame.
  • The inside of ships in a view was filled with the colour of water, and the sea bottom looked dark.
  • Walking through a portal while its saved view was still loading could leave the old view in place.
  • Portals that lead to a portal with another name work with XPortal and XPortalNetworks.
  • Safer after game updates: a change in the game no longer stops every capture or leaves the mod half-working.

Updating

  • Replace the DLL while the game is closed. Settings and saved views carry over; each view is captured once more on your next trip through it (or right away with frozenportal refresh next to the portal).
  • A new pair of portals shows its views after your first trip through it; two linked portals standing next to each other show them right after linking.

1.1.4

  • Fixed: textures and surface lighting in portal views could look flat or wrong after restarting the game.
  • Fixed: portals near each other could flicker between which one shows its view.
  • Fixed: a closing portal view could disappear before its spiral finished.
  • Nearby water is now part of the portal view instead of being hidden behind the terrain.
  • Full-resolution textures are kept, including texture packs (these can use more disk space).
  • New console command frozenportal log on|off for detailed timings.
  • Saved scenes from this version cannot be read by older versions of the mod. No cache reset is needed.

1.1.3

  • Fixed: building ghosts and your own lights no longer appear in portal views.
  • Fixed: texture-pack changes are picked up correctly by new captures.
  • Fixed: some flickering and mismatched lighting while a portal view was being rebuilt.
  • Lower memory use while saving a capture.
  • Capturing during teleport waits for a fully black screen and gives up after three seconds, keeping the old view.
  • Use frozenportal refresh next to a portal to remove ghosts or lights already baked into an older view.

1.1.2

  • The distant landscape and clouds behind a portal view are twice as sharp on the High and Ultra hardware profiles and no longer shimmer from afar.
  • New setting Panorama resolution (0 = by hardware profile, 512, 1024 or 2048). Higher values are sharper but make each capture longer and use more video memory.
  • Existing views keep their panorama until the portal is captured again.