Official addons

Portals

An addon for RP Engine: a plugin that installs into the engine and adds one thing, rather than a pack you author yourself. Drop it in beside the engine and it brings its own content with it.

This one opens portals: a ring of sparks with a window in the middle onto somewhere else. You see the far side through it as you walk up, with its own blocks, sky, clouds and light, and you come out of the other ring still moving the way you were. Right-click a portal to shut it down to a small glowing ball, and again to open it.

Installing#

Portals needs Spigot or Paper 26.2 with players on Java Edition 26.2 (the window is drawn by the game's own shaders, through a resource pack, and that part is written for 26.2), and RP Engine 0.2.11 or newer, which draws the ring. No client mods. Bedrock players do not see portals.

Drop RPE-portals.jar in plugins/ beside RPEngine.jar and start the server. Its content (the ring, its sounds and the shaders that draw the window) installs itself into plugins/RPEngine/content/portals/ on first boot, and the engine reloads once to pick it up.

The window is drawn with the game's own block textures, which a server does not have, so on first start the plugin downloads the Minecraft client jar for your server's version from Mojang, once, into plugins/RPEPortals/cache/. Set textures.download: false to skip that, and every block is drawn in a flat colour instead.

Placing portals#

1. Stand where you want your portals to lead, facing the way you want to come out, and run /portals mark.
2. Go anywhere else, in the same world or another, and run /portals place. A pair opens: one ring a few blocks in front of you, facing you, and the other at your mark.
3. Walk into the ring. You come out of the other one.

/portals place again moves your pair: a player has one pair at a time (pairs-per-player in the config), and placing another takes the oldest away.

/portal works too. Right-click a portal to open or shut it, and sneak and right-click it to take it away.

Permissions#

Every command has its own node, and so does every option that reaches past your own portals.

portals.player hands out everything a player needs and portals.admin everything; nothing checks either directly. Negate portals.travel to make portals something to look through only.

Configuration#

plugins/RPEPortals/config.yml:

portal:
  # Diameter in blocks. The hole is 80% of it.
  size: 5.8
  # How far in front of you a portal opens, in blocks.
  distance: 3.5
  # Seconds a pair stays open before it closes itself. 0 keeps it open.
  lifetime: 0
  # How many pairs one player can have at once. Placing another takes the oldest away.
  pairs-per-player: 1
 
# Download the client jar from Mojang once, for the block textures in the window.
textures:
  download: true
 
sounds:
  open: portals:portal_open
  loop: portals:portal_loop
  close: portals:portal_close
  volume: 1.5

Every message the plugin sends is under messages: in the same file, in MiniMessage.

What you see through one#

The window shows the blocks on the far side, ray-traced by the game's text shader from maps the plugin sends: 128 blocks across, 63 deep and 28 tall in full detail, with the block textures, plants, water, the biome's grass and leaf colours, the light, and the game's own ambient occlusion. Beyond that the land carries on for a few hundred blocks in coarser columns, treetops included, then the sky, drawn with the game's own sky colours and the very clouds the far side has, where it has them. Through a portal to the Nether you see its fog and its light.

It shows blocks only: players, mobs and dropped items on the far side are not in the window. What is drawn is read as the far side changes, a slice at a time, so a block placed over there appears within a second or so.

Two limits worth knowing:

• One mod of the text shader at a time. The window is drawn by the game's text shader, which a resource pack can replace only once. Another plugin that replaces it too (RP Engine's own HUD shader objects, for one) and only one of them works.
• It costs frame rate up close. The window is a stack of maps in invisible item frames, each drawn by the game. A shut portal, or one seen from behind, draws nothing.

For plugin developers#

Portals has its own API: open pairs anywhere at any size, shut and open them, and listen for every open, toggle, removal and crossing.

PortalsApi api = PortalsApi.get();
api.open(
        PortalPlace.standing(spawnGround, 180f),
        PortalPlace.standing(arenaGround, 0f),
        PortalOptions.builder().size(9).lifetimeSeconds(60).build());

Add depend: [RPEPortals] (or softdepend) to your plugin.yml and compile against the Portals jar. The events are PortalOpenEvent, PortalToggleEvent, PortalRemoveEvent and PortalTravelEvent, all cancellable; the last can also send the traveller somewhere else.

Source#

Portals is free software under the GPL-3.0 licence, at github.com/resourcepack-ai/rpe-portals. Its README explains how the window is drawn, and issues and pull requests are welcome there.