PortalPreview

Shows the place a wooden or stone portal leads to inside its frame. The destination is captured once as a frozen 3D scene with its lighting and kept on disk, and the frame becomes a window onto it: the view has true parallax as you move, opens in a spiral as you approach, blends into the frame with a rippling edge and has smoke drifting along the seam.

The scene is frozen by design: its lighting, time of day and particles are those of the moment it was captured. That keeps an open portal at about a millisecond per frame instead of rendering the destination live.

Requirements

• Valheim with BepInEx 5 on Windows.

Recommended (optional)

• FastLoading: faster portal travel and dungeon entrances, so stepping through a portal takes a moment rather than a loading screen.
• ValheimVisuals: water, reflections, materials and ambient occlusion turned up within the game's own ranges, for a better picture everywhere.

Install

1. Close Valheim.
2. Put PortalPreview.dll into Valheim/BepInEx/plugins/.

How it captures

• A portal's destination is captured when the portal is first linked, or with Capture mode DuringTeleport each time you leave through it, under the loading screen.
• Only loaded places can be captured: walk through a new portal once and both ends get their view.
• Wooden and stone portals work in any pairing; the game links them to each other by tag.
• Saved scenes live in BepInEx/cache/PortalPreview/PortalSnapshots. Scenes and data nothing uses any more (a portal torn down, an older game version, what a recapture left behind) are removed automatically once per session.

Settings

BepInEx/config/ru.ivest.portalpreview.cfg, all live with Configuration Manager. The main ones:

Console (F5): frozenportal status, on, off, refresh (recapture nearby portals), cleanup (remove stale saved scenes now).

Only errors reach the log. To see what the preview does (captures, loads, frame costs, why a view is not drawn), start the game with the launch option -portalpreview-log.

Limits

• Wooden and stone portals of the base game. Portals added by other mods keep their normal look.
• A destination nobody has visited in this installation has no view yet.
• The scene is frozen: no moving creatures, time of day or weather inside the frame.

Multiplayer

Client-side. Each player captures the portals they use; nothing is sent over the network.

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.