Someone found a neat way to abuse portals in CTF on my server:



The blue portal can of course be anywhere else, ideally far away and well defended

Idea behind it: enemy wants to grab flag, but can't touch it because he gets teleported away by the portal first.

To set up an almost invulnerable portal flag defense, you need a deployer and helpful team mates:
- Deployer puts red portal at flag, blue portal elsewhere, and runs away (e.g. hides, or stacks up health)
- Helpful team mates regularily use the portal (e.g. by jumping in the red portal, or shooting a rocket/electro/laser/grenade/hagar at the red portal)

Why? Easy. Portals can time out, and can be destroyed by shooting the BLUE portal. But USING them in any way (e.g. teleporting yourself or some projectile through it) refreshes their health and timer. So regularily "feeding" a portal keeps it alive.

Portals also go away IMMEDIATELY if their owner (the one who created it) dies. That's why the deployer should go to some safer place.

A clear abuse of the behaviour of portals, but I like it. A nice strategic element

To break the portal flag defense, the enemy flag carrier has to destroy either the blue portal before someone feeds it again (maybe kill these guys first, note that shotgun can't feed portals), or kill the portal's owner (who may be anywhere).

The bad part is, the flag carrier has to do it TOO. So when the helpful team mates see their flag carrier, they start shooting the BLUE portal instead of the RED one with all they have, to destroy the portal flag defense and make their flag carrier cap. The flag carrier should of course shoot at the portal too.

NOTE however: portals are only vulnerable to explosions, Laser, Mortar, Electro, Crylink, Hagar, Rocket Launcher. The Shotgun, MG and Nex can NOT harm or feed a sophisticated high-tech device like a portal!

Yes, it really worked when I just tried it. Strange enough, when our flag carrier came he could capture without problems. (?)

Other odd thing: the first time I tried it I shot a rocket at the red portal... and it was destroyed immediately. :/

Now that enhances the idea. Put the portal not directly below the flag, but BEHIND it a bit (so the portal's edge is about at the flag's center). Then one can still grab the flag when walking slowly (by touching the flag, not the portal). And a FC returning the flag does not even need to walk slowly...

We definitely need better portal models, that's my opinion.

Agreed, but the only ones Morphed made as alternatives were IMHO much worse than these ones (LONG rays sticking out, and then even rotated the wrong way, which was a total showstopper).

What file extension are they? .md3, .zym or .mdl? I could model something out, making a couple of concepts and see which one people liked the most.

zym if animated, anything else otherwise, and they need the same orientation of the portals as the current model has. Just use that as a reference, or try until the code works for it.
Basically, the model is placed so v_forward points out of the floor.

Why not do something similar to the portals in the game Portal? They basically just stick a decal texture on the floor. Then there is an invisible camera attached to the "Destination" portal. The texture for the source portal is whatever the camera on the destination portal sees.

For that to work, we first need cameras in darkplaces.