Week D: Dimensional Doorways

This week is an exciting new entry in my A-Z Game Effects journey. I explored the world of portals which I am calling Dimensional Doorways. These are all integrated into a single scene, so that it can seamlessly teleport the player from point A in the world to point B. The initial inspiration for these came from another Godot developer. But I felt there was a few chances to optimize over his design. I do not blame him for not doing it my way, as the first time with these new topics is always difficult. Any ways my portals work by linking two portals and making them aware of each other. Technically multiple portals can lead to the same portal. But that same portal only leads to one other. Although I could see the possibility for building in a gate or dialing system that could easily point to other portals, since I ultimately put them all under the same Node3D. Each portal was also designed to technically be standalone. Although, they do need their link so that they can show the other's camera as a material on it's mesh. I only include 3D planes in this demo, but I did test it with sphere's, cylinders and a few other shapes. Additional improvements in the local cameras would be needed to properly support these other shapes, though and were not in the scope of this project. Because the portal simply gets the other portals SubViewPort camera and sets it as a ViewPort texture material, I was able to avoid the issue of using a special camera to render the view port on the 2D screen. This optimization allowed me to not need a second un-shaded MeshInstance3D for each MeshInstance3D, over all reducing the number of vertices needed for this effect. No special setup at all, it just works. The only optimization that I wound up needing to make was for mobile devices I reduced the rendering to only when Godot detects the ViewPort as being seen, as compared to all of the time. This optimization might even be possible for all devices but I would need further testing to be sure.
I also added touch screen controls for mobile players to use on Native downloads. I am not sure if it will work in a mobile browser though I will test it soon. Finally I also baked a light map for the scene to further help low-end devices cope with the lighting and shadows.