Portals are now open

[Yukar9]

This post is no longer updated. For updated information on how portals work, please see the wiki page.

The portals plugin as described in viewtopic.php?f=5&t=2298 is now active on the server.

First, two things to clear out. These portals have nothing to do with nether portals. The PvP world is not being disabled (now.) If we decide to remove the pvp world, that will be a separate decision at another time.

Another important note is that this plugin is in testing, both for glitches and functionality. Don't use them if you're not willing to take a risk. Please report any found bugs.

Now, portals look like this. They're small obisidan portals. To use them, stand in the middle of one and type /portal. Portals will be broken by breaking just a single of the obsidian blocks that they consist of. In such a case, the portals will simply stop working, even if you then place the obsidian back.

Creating a set of portals costs 1 diamond block and 5 lapis blocks, and also 20 obsidian for building the actual portals. First you type /portal buy, this will then credit your account with 1 portal. (You can type /portal to see how many portals you're credited with.) You can buy as many portals as you want, and you'll keep your credits until you use them, even if you die. 1 credit gives 1 set of portals (ie. 2 ends of portals.) Portals can only be connected 1 and 1, though there's nothing preventing you from setting up multiple portals.

After you're credited with at least 1 portal, go to where you want to place the one end of the portal, then you should build a 4 block high 3 block wide portal that looks like this. Important to note is that the portal must face east-west. When you've done that, type /portal set. After this, travel to where you want the other end of the portal to be located, and repeat the above steps to also build a portal there. When successful, both locations will then be connected, and you're free to use them. If you die after having set one end of a portal, that portal will be forfeit (including the credit you paid,) and you'll have to start all over. That means you have to be able to travel between the two ends of your portals without dying at all. If you set the first end of a portal, and somebody then breaks the obsidian at it, the set will also be forfeit.

That's it, enjoy the portals.

[Gnatogryz]

Good stuff!

INB4 somebody whines it's not vanilla, since Mojang refuses to provide any viable means of transport (minecart enchantments? making furnace minecarts not suck?), we need our own solution. It's command-based, which kinda sucks, but it's better than nothing.

[Yukar9]

I agree the commands kinda suck, I originally wanted to use portal blocks and then have people walk into them to tp, but apparently the game doesn't allow that without changing some of the physics rules.

It would technically be possible to have the game listen on every single playermoveevent and then teleport when somebody moves into the portal. But that requires a SQL lookup for every single player online in every single tick, which is just not viable at all.

As has been suggested, I might rewrite the portal creation part so that you have to physically build the portals instead of issuing commands, that would be possible, but if it happens it'll come later.

[Yukar9]

Made some changes, players now have to build their portals themselves (effectively adding 20 obsidian to the cost of the portal.)

[SilasOfBorg]

Cool beans!

Looking forward to playing again, should be able to get a new compy this xmas, or maybe M$ will fix the glitchy physics beforHAHAHAHAHAHA yeah right.

[Yukar9]

Sounds good, although that wait does suck.

Sorry if I forgot, but have you found out precisely what's causing the lag?

[SilasOfBorg]

Mostly.

Some discussion here: viewtopic.php?f=7&t=2278

I did a little more digging after that thread and found out that they recoded the rendering engine to take advantage of certain MMX/AVX/SSE extensions that most newer processors have, in order to make more realistic water appearance (driven by underwater temples apparently looking like shit in the initial drops).

I do not have a newer processor. I have an old budget AMD processor, which is solid and gets the job done but doesn't apparently have whatever fancy instruction set Minecraft now requires to not run like shit.