OttoBifrost

For Valheim 1.0.12

Walk up to a portal and you see through it. The disc on the portal shows the far end, as a picture or live, and while you look the mod loads that place. By the time you step through, the floors and walls over there already exist. A trip between two built bases becomes a walk instead of a loading screen.

Maintainer: Paul Otto

What it does

• A window in the portal. Within 12 m of a connected wood or stone portal, a round preview shows the arrival side, and both faces of the portal show the same place. The disc is sized for the wood arch, so it looks small on the stone portal. The preview has two modes, set with PreviewMode:
  • StaticView, the default. The mod takes a picture of the destination, facing the way you face when you arrive, as soon as everything within 40 m in front of the far portal exists. When the rest of the arrival area has loaded, it takes a second picture to fill in distant buildings. The picture stays until you walk away, and each new approach starts again. It shimmers and ripples, fades out at its rim, and lets 30% of the portal behind it show through.
  • LiveView. The preview renders continuously and follows your head, so the view shifts as you move.
• Loading before you arrive. Within 15 m of a portal the zones around its destination start to load. Past 10 m that is 3x3 zones, inside 10 m it is 5x5, and inside 5 m it is 7x7. The area grows over a few seconds, and objects at the far end are created in small batches, so walking up does not hitch.
• A room full of portals. The portal nearest to you loads first and at full size. Every other destination loads 3x3, which is enough for its preview. A different portal only takes over as nearest once it is 2 m closer, so pacing around a hub room does not drag the load back and forth between bases.
• Faster teleports. When the destination is preloaded, the vanilla wait is skipped. The trip ends as soon as every object within 40 m of the arrival point exists and there is a floor under you. The far edges of a big base can finish building after you land. If that is already true you walk straight through. If it is not, the screen dims while the rest arrives, and at the vanilla 8 second mark vanilla takes over. Dungeon doors are left alone.

What it costs

StaticView renders at most twice per portal per approach, at most one portal per frame, and nothing after that.

In LiveView only the closest preview renders live. The others keep their last frame. The live one renders every frame inside 4 m, 10 times a second out to 8 m, and 3 times a second beyond that. In my six-portal hub room a preview render averaged 1.4 ms.

Both modes render without shadows and with a 300 m draw distance.

The game writes BepInEx/config/potto007.OttoBifrost.cfg the first time it runs with the mod loaded. When the server has the mod, the OttoBifrost section comes from the server.

Installation (manual)

Extract the DLL from the zip into <GameDirectory>\BepInEx\plugins, then start the game.

Installation (automatic)

Use Gale, r2modman or the Thunderstore Mod Manager. OttoBifrost is on Thunderstore and on Hexium. Search for it and install.

Servers

OttoBifrost works client only, and it works better with the mod on the server too.

A dedicated server sends each player only the objects near that player. Without the mod on the server you can preload only bases you already visited this session. A first visit shows bare terrain in the preview, the base builds itself around you after you land, and every fast teleport waits for the arrival area to stop changing.

With the mod on the server, each player reports the portals they stand near, and the server also sends the objects around each destination, after the player's own area. It accepts at most 8 portals per player, and only portals within 30 m of that player, so nobody can use it to scan the map. The server tells the player when a destination has nothing left to send, and a trip to a complete destination is a walk-through.

When both sides have the mod, the server config wins and the versions must match. A player on a different version cannot join.

Version information

The release history lives in CHANGELOG.md, and it renders on the Changelog tab of the Thunderstore package page.

Credits

OttoBifrost is written and maintained by Paul Otto. It depends on the BepInEx pack, and it carries ServerSync inside the DLL for the config sync and the version check. Bugs are mine, so report them at https://github.com/potto007/OttoBifrost. MIT licence.