Uh, correct me if I'm wrong, but unless you start at 0, Y, 0, you don't multiply or divide by 8, but by the difference -- otherwise you get huge numbers really fast.
So if I go from 10, 64, 10 to 10, 64, 20, the distance is 80, and the destination is z=90 (10 + 8* the distance), not 160.
All words all the time is hard to grok. Here's my contribution to the cause, a quick PowerPoint presentation showing how portals work.
Here's a teaser image to whet your tastebuds:
That only occurs if there's only one portal in the Nether; and/or the co-ordinates of either/both gates are wrong. If the co-ords aren't right, the game starts guessing. It's the guessing that screws things up.
That only occurs if there's only one portal in the Nether
Yes, that's explained on an earlier page of my presentation, page 3. The teaser diagram is just that, a teaser, to get you to check out the presentation, the link is here.
and/or the co-ordinates of either/both gates are wrong. If the co-ords aren't right, the game starts guessing. It's the guessing that screws things up.
I'm not following, how do the gate coordinates get to be wrong? I'm maybe missing something in the original post (which talks about the weirdness of spawned nether portals, but not about wrong coordinates). Please explain more, thanks - this sounds interesting.
[Having 2 Nether Portals side by side might be better for destination clarity, rather than a 2-in-1 portal. (I tested the 2-in-1 portal myself - it works!)]
I made a transport system with paired portals (the single split portal was way too hard to get exactly right), the . Frankly, it's a loser, time-wise, and quite hard to make it all stable and get all portals to be perfectly tied one-to-one to each other (at least for me). But, it was fun to try, and was interesting to bop from nether to overworld and back again.
So I'd love a clarification. It's the bottom two blocks of the portal that are used for distance computations, cool (obviously someone's decompiled the code). Is that bottom block coordinate something like 35.5,93.5,-29.5 or 35.0,93.0,-29.0? In other words, is the block's center or lower-left position used? I assume this is compared with the precise XYZ position of the person.
I'm not following, how do the gate coordinates get to be wrong? I'm maybe missing something in the original post (which talks about the weirdness of spawned nether portals, but not about wrong coordinates). Please explain more, thanks - this sounds interesting.
Like you said in your slides. Someone builds an overworld gate; you go through it, generated gate is in the wrong location because of lava or something in the way. Then I've also had times where I've built gates manually, but still got it wrong myself.
If you put a gate within the 33x33 range Xihuan mentioned, while a nearby pair is not at the exact correct co-ords, usually the gate you'll get bounced back to in my experience, is the gate with the wrong co-ords in the Nether. It produces the "many Overworld gates to one Nether gate" effect.
So I'd love a clarification. It's the bottom two blocks of the portal that are used for distance computations, cool (obviously someone's decompiled the code). Is that bottom block coordinate something like 35.5,93.5,-29.5 or 35.0,93.0,-29.0? In other words, is the block's center or lower-left position used? I assume this is compared with the precise XYZ position of the person.
The number 35.0, 92.0, -30.0 is used if you are standing in 35.5, 93.5, -29.5.
X, 35.5 ---> 35.0 Because the decimal part is chopped off.
Y, 93.5 ---> 92.0 Because Steve is 1.6 meters tall.
Z, -29.5 ---> -30.0 Because even though the decimal part is chopped off, it chops off to the next lower integer. If it doesn't, then -0.5 and 0.5 would both go to 0 and that's wrong. (In coding terms, math.floor(-29.49) gives the result -30. That is, rounding down is not the same as rounding towards 0.)
I've linked your nice slideshow in the first post.
Like you said in your slides. Someone builds an overworld gate; you go through it, generated gate is in the wrong location because of lava or something in the way. Then I've also had times where I've built gates manually, but still got it wrong myself.
Aha, what you're calling a bug here, I call a feature. Like I showed in , you can use it as a transportation system. Also, the one-way feature is nice if you're in the boondocks, exploring: build a portal and you can fly back 1000 meters or more, one way, back to civilization. That said, I agree that it's generally more useful to have portals be as close as possible to each other's location, overworld and nether.
If you put a gate within the 33x33 range Xihuan mentioned, while a nearby pair is not at the exact correct co-ords, usually the gate you'll get bounced back to in my experience, is the gate with the wrong co-ords in the Nether. It produces the "many Overworld gates to one Nether gate" effect.
As far as the portal dead zone goes, that's for spawned portals only, AFAIK (vs. portals we create) - right? We've definitely run into this bug, I believe. One player went to the nether, only to find it was a vast plane with nothing in it! Picture here:
I think what happened was that he got pushed to the top of the Nether, due to the "safe zone" created by the spawned nether portal. We've broken and rebuilt one cube of this portal, which I believe is enough to cure the problem.
Aha, what you're calling a bug here, I call a feature. Like I showed in , you can use it as a transportation system. Also, the one-way feature is nice if you're in the boondocks, exploring: build a portal and you can fly back 1000 meters or more, one way, back to civilization.
a} Walk to x0,y64,z120 in the Nether, (hypothetical co-ords, for the sake of example) while also laying down powered/unpowered rails from your point of entry. This may seem arduous, but if you bring rails with you, you only have to do it once. You will need 13 powered rails and redstone torches, and 117 unpowered rails.
b} Build portal at those Nether co-ords, and go through.
c} Discover that portal has most likely been incorrectly placed in the overworld. Cut up auto-generated portal with diamond pickaxe, go to x0,y64,z960, (which will likely be fairly close by) and rebuild overworld portal.
d} Walk through overworld portal, and ride powered minecart back through Nether, to original point of entry.
Assuming a minecart speed of 8 blocks per second, the minecart journey should take just under 14 seconds. This means that a round trip over a distance of 1920 blocks (960 each on z axis if starting at zero, and more if overworld destination portal is placed at bedrock, because you get Y axis travel for free) can be achieved in around 32 seconds, plus loading time.
I think what happened was that he got pushed to the top of the Nether, due to the "safe zone" created by the spawned nether portal. We've broken and rebuilt one cube of this portal, which I believe is enough to cure the problem.
You would know for sure if you pressed F3 right? lol.
You would know for sure if you pressed F3 right? lol.
Yes, he would have known if he had, sadly he didn't. He was just thrilled when I logged in so he could teleport to my position and get out of that nightmarish land.
can this be used to travel between 2 portals in the overworld...say i wanted to access my sky castle without walking up a f***load of stairs can i make a portal on sealevel and one in my castle then link them to travel DIRECTLY between them???
can this be used to travel between 2 portals in the overworld...say i wanted to access my sky castle without walking up a f***load of stairs can i make a portal on sealevel and one in my castle then link them to travel DIRECTLY between them???
You can, Mike. I make portals that go from bedrock to the surface all the time, now.
I am not sure what you mean by directly. They still send you into the Nether; but it's possible to build an overworld gate down on the ground, and another in your sky castle, but have them two blocks apart on the same level in the Nether. So you only have to walk two blocks to get to the other gate.
MrErichaines, this is a reply to your linked video on YouTube. :biggrin.gif:
It's pretty easy to make a single pair of portals, especially in the nether (where 1 meter is a difference of 8 in the overworld), one linking above, the other below.
OP
|
NP NP
.......|
......OP
Just make the OP and NP coordinates for each pair essentially the same in XZ and you're golden. Cake.
For a challenge, try to make a series of doubled portals like I have in this video (cue dueling music.)
What the portals I showed in that video do is this:
OP - 120m - NP NPa - 120m - OPa OPb - 120m - NPb NP - 120m - OP
OP is overworld portal, NP is nether portal, 120m means the distance between two linked portals is about 120m in overworld coordinates (always), in X and/or Z (Y is easy). It can't be more than 128m in one direction or the nether portal won't find the linked overworld portal.
Put yourself under the constraint I've put on myself: each portal should be at a natural ground level, in an interesting spot - no putting the portals all at the same altitude, all along the X axis, etc. Have each separate line of portals wind around in both the Nether and in the Overworld, taking different winding paths. Without the ability to put portals wherever you want, instead constrained as I was, you'll find it's easy to go wrong. That's where the touchiness comes in. I do this for three pairs of "OP OP" portals. Try it and see - it's easy to go wrong.
NP going to OP is relatively easy: put the NP NP paired portals 3 meters apart in the Nether and this is 24 meters in the overworld, lots of slack. The main headache of making an overworld portal is finding it's just barely out of range of the NP portal, so the NP portal doesn't connect to it but instead spawns a new overworld portal nearby. Still, that spawned portal is free obsidian, and you get to mine it in the sunlight.
OP going to NP can be a real pain! The problem with the OP pairs is you have to do them just right: NPa to OPa and back is easy enough, NPb to OPb is easy, but OPb to NPb is often not quite right (well, it's much easier now that I know how the heck portals are measured for distance), and you'll find OPb will often go back to NPa instead because NPb was not quite close enough to OPb. Or OPa will now go to NPb because NPb was too close to both. Touchy.
To make life even more interesting, I realized half-way into the process that you really want to be careful to keep the 120m distance pretty constant between pairs. Say you make one of the links 80m instead. What happens is that now both of the portals in an "OP OP" pair will jump to the same nether portal, because the nether portal 80m away is closer to both of them than the nether portal 120m away.
Probably I've lost everyone at this point, but believe me, it's honestly a pain to do things just right, not too far and not too near, for a chain of portals winding around each world in a non-boring way. Though, like I say, now that I have a better idea of what locations on a portal are its "centers", this makes the task easier.
If you made it this far, then you're a Scientist. So, I'll pass on an interesting (and impractical) idea: a one-way chain of portals, with each OP->NP jump in the chain being a long distance. Normally you can take a long jump with OP->NP, but here you can go OP->NP->OP->NP and each OP->NP jump can be quite long.
The first OP to NP is trivial, so don't worry about it (or if you must, put the first OP1 at (-1023,5,-1023) for a nice big jump). Put a NP2 at say 125 high, call it (0,125,0). Put an OP3 portal at bedrock, (0,5,0), just to keep things simple (you could put it out as far as 128m in X and Z, which would actually help the next step - see below). These portals are linked and are 120m apart, purely vertically.
The interesting part is where you can put the next NP4 portal in the chain. Put the next nether portal horizontally from OP3. You can put this portal in the nether so that it's < 120m away from the OP in nether space and the OP will connect to it. OP3 goes to (0,5,0) in nether space. Say you put the NP4 portal at (0+119,5,0) - the distance between OP3 and NP4 is then 119m, just under 120m. Jumping 119m in nether space from OP3 to NP4 is the same as jumping 952m in overworld space. And you can continue this type of thing forever, but it's a one-way chain. Basically, jumping from NP to OP by a large vertical distance allows you to translate that distance into a very long jump, just short of 8x the height change, going from OP to NP.
You can do even better by offsetting OP3 away from NP2 and maximizing the distance between the two, but this doesn't add a lot. Say you put OP3 at (128,5,128) in overworld coordinates, still in the search range of NP2. When going from OP3 to NP4, the NP2 portal is (in nether distance) sqrt(16*16+120*120+16*16), a little over 122m. So you could go horizontally <= 122m instead of < 120m - minimal gain, getting you maybe another 24m in the overworld (though you did also get a nice extra bit of distance traveled going from NP2 to OP3).
Anyway, this should work, but I'd never build it. As soon as anyone built a nether portal anywhere along the chain, it would be broken. Note: there might be some off-by-one errors in the above, don't blame me if you try it (you mad fool!) and push the limits too hard.
I suspect I could set up two one-way chains in 3D (basically, I could form a ring), like two arcs (), with the height differential increasing with each OP->NP move so that each chain doesn't interfere with the other. That's for another rainy day.
Anyway, this should work, but I'd never build it. As soon as anyone built a nether portal anywhere along the chain, it would be broken. Note: there might be some off-by-one errors in the above, don't blame me if you try it (you mad fool!) and push the limits too hard.
It's an interesting idea. You seem to be trying to deliberately manipulate the search ranges that the system uses, to decide which portal to go to, rather than putting each portal in an arbitary/precise location. One thing that didn't occur to me, is the idea that it might actually be possible to get fast travel through the Nether itself. If we could perfect the technique, we might be able to create a scenario where people have a cluster of portals more closely together as a more local fast travel network, but then having another portal a little further away, (due to the need for being outside the 33x33 threshold, if not using precise co-ords) to actually jump to another longer distance portal within the Nether itself.
My brain hurts just thinking about it at the moment, but I might have to try and do some experimentation with it at some point.
The number 35.0, 92.0, -30.0 is used if you are standing in 35.5, 93.5, -29.5.
X, 35.5 ---> 35.0 Because the decimal part is chopped off.
Y, 93.5 ---> 92.0 Because Steve is 1.6 meters tall.
Z, -29.5 ---> -30.0 Because even though the decimal part is chopped off, it chops off to the next lower integer. If it doesn't, then -0.5 and 0.5 would both go to 0 and that's wrong. (In coding terms, math.floor(-29.49) gives the result -30. That is, rounding down is not the same as rounding towards 0.)
I've linked your nice slideshow in the first post.
Thanks, this is just what I wanted to know (and so much simpler than I thought - I expected him to use the exact XYZ position of the character, why not?). Now maybe I can work out the kinks in my paired-portal system and get things just right - there's actually a flaw in one portal pair, I found out today.
Thanks also for the link, I hope it helps people out.
So if I go from 10, 64, 10 to 10, 64, 20, the distance is 80, and the destination is z=90 (10 + 8* the distance), not 160.
Right?
10, 64, 10 Nether <----> 80, 64, 80 Normal
10, 64, 20 Nether <----> 80, 64, 160 Normal
So if you walked 10 distance in the nether from Z=10 to Z=20, you would have traveled 80 distance in the normal world (from Z=80 to Z=160).
Yes, the numbers DO get huge very fast, but that's the whole point of it - to travel quickly.
Glass Dome Project
Here's a teaser image to whet your tastebuds:
That only occurs if there's only one portal in the Nether; and/or the co-ordinates of either/both gates are wrong. If the co-ords aren't right, the game starts guessing. It's the guessing that screws things up.
Yes, that's explained on an earlier page of my presentation, page 3. The teaser diagram is just that, a teaser, to get you to check out the presentation, the link is here.
I'm not following, how do the gate coordinates get to be wrong? I'm maybe missing something in the original post (which talks about the weirdness of spawned nether portals, but not about wrong coordinates). Please explain more, thanks - this sounds interesting.
I made a transport system with paired portals (the single split portal was way too hard to get exactly right), the . Frankly, it's a loser, time-wise, and quite hard to make it all stable and get all portals to be perfectly tied one-to-one to each other (at least for me). But, it was fun to try, and was interesting to bop from nether to overworld and back again.
So I'd love a clarification. It's the bottom two blocks of the portal that are used for distance computations, cool (obviously someone's decompiled the code). Is that bottom block coordinate something like 35.5,93.5,-29.5 or 35.0,93.0,-29.0? In other words, is the block's center or lower-left position used? I assume this is compared with the precise XYZ position of the person.
Like you said in your slides. Someone builds an overworld gate; you go through it, generated gate is in the wrong location because of lava or something in the way. Then I've also had times where I've built gates manually, but still got it wrong myself.
If you put a gate within the 33x33 range Xihuan mentioned, while a nearby pair is not at the exact correct co-ords, usually the gate you'll get bounced back to in my experience, is the gate with the wrong co-ords in the Nether. It produces the "many Overworld gates to one Nether gate" effect.
The number 35.0, 92.0, -30.0 is used if you are standing in 35.5, 93.5, -29.5.
X, 35.5 ---> 35.0 Because the decimal part is chopped off.
Y, 93.5 ---> 92.0 Because Steve is 1.6 meters tall.
Z, -29.5 ---> -30.0 Because even though the decimal part is chopped off, it chops off to the next lower integer. If it doesn't, then -0.5 and 0.5 would both go to 0 and that's wrong. (In coding terms, math.floor(-29.49) gives the result -30. That is, rounding down is not the same as rounding towards 0.)
I've linked your nice slideshow in the first post.
Aha, what you're calling a bug here, I call a feature. Like I showed in , you can use it as a transportation system. Also, the one-way feature is nice if you're in the boondocks, exploring: build a portal and you can fly back 1000 meters or more, one way, back to civilization. That said, I agree that it's generally more useful to have portals be as close as possible to each other's location, overworld and nether.
As far as the portal dead zone goes, that's for spawned portals only, AFAIK (vs. portals we create) - right? We've definitely run into this bug, I believe. One player went to the nether, only to find it was a vast plane with nothing in it! Picture here:
I think what happened was that he got pushed to the top of the Nether, due to the "safe zone" created by the spawned nether portal. We've broken and rebuilt one cube of this portal, which I believe is enough to cure the problem.
a} Walk to x0,y64,z120 in the Nether, (hypothetical co-ords, for the sake of example) while also laying down powered/unpowered rails from your point of entry. This may seem arduous, but if you bring rails with you, you only have to do it once. You will need 13 powered rails and redstone torches, and 117 unpowered rails.
b} Build portal at those Nether co-ords, and go through.
c} Discover that portal has most likely been incorrectly placed in the overworld. Cut up auto-generated portal with diamond pickaxe, go to x0,y64,z960, (which will likely be fairly close by) and rebuild overworld portal.
d} Walk through overworld portal, and ride powered minecart back through Nether, to original point of entry.
Assuming a minecart speed of 8 blocks per second, the minecart journey should take just under 14 seconds. This means that a round trip over a distance of 1920 blocks (960 each on z axis if starting at zero, and more if overworld destination portal is placed at bedrock, because you get Y axis travel for free) can be achieved in around 32 seconds, plus loading time.
You would know for sure if you pressed F3 right? lol.
MrErichaines, this is a reply to your linked video on YouTube. :biggrin.gif:
Yes, he would have known if he had, sadly he didn't. He was just thrilled when I logged in so he could teleport to my position and get out of that nightmarish land.
Check out the link and click the egg. Its just that simple.
You can, Mike. I make portals that go from bedrock to the surface all the time, now.
I am not sure what you mean by directly. They still send you into the Nether; but it's possible to build an overworld gate down on the ground, and another in your sky castle, but have them two blocks apart on the same level in the Nether. So you only have to walk two blocks to get to the other gate.
It's pretty easy to make a single pair of portals, especially in the nether (where 1 meter is a difference of 8 in the overworld), one linking above, the other below.
OP
|
NP NP
.......|
......OP
Just make the OP and NP coordinates for each pair essentially the same in XZ and you're golden. Cake.
For a challenge, try to make a series of doubled portals like I have in this video (cue dueling music.)
What the portals I showed in that video do is this:
OP - 120m - NP NPa - 120m - OPa OPb - 120m - NPb NP - 120m - OP
OP is overworld portal, NP is nether portal, 120m means the distance between two linked portals is about 120m in overworld coordinates (always), in X and/or Z (Y is easy). It can't be more than 128m in one direction or the nether portal won't find the linked overworld portal.
Put yourself under the constraint I've put on myself: each portal should be at a natural ground level, in an interesting spot - no putting the portals all at the same altitude, all along the X axis, etc. Have each separate line of portals wind around in both the Nether and in the Overworld, taking different winding paths. Without the ability to put portals wherever you want, instead constrained as I was, you'll find it's easy to go wrong. That's where the touchiness comes in. I do this for three pairs of "OP OP" portals. Try it and see - it's easy to go wrong.
NP going to OP is relatively easy: put the NP NP paired portals 3 meters apart in the Nether and this is 24 meters in the overworld, lots of slack. The main headache of making an overworld portal is finding it's just barely out of range of the NP portal, so the NP portal doesn't connect to it but instead spawns a new overworld portal nearby. Still, that spawned portal is free obsidian, and you get to mine it in the sunlight.
OP going to NP can be a real pain! The problem with the OP pairs is you have to do them just right: NPa to OPa and back is easy enough, NPb to OPb is easy, but OPb to NPb is often not quite right (well, it's much easier now that I know how the heck portals are measured for distance), and you'll find OPb will often go back to NPa instead because NPb was not quite close enough to OPb. Or OPa will now go to NPb because NPb was too close to both. Touchy.
To make life even more interesting, I realized half-way into the process that you really want to be careful to keep the 120m distance pretty constant between pairs. Say you make one of the links 80m instead. What happens is that now both of the portals in an "OP OP" pair will jump to the same nether portal, because the nether portal 80m away is closer to both of them than the nether portal 120m away.
Probably I've lost everyone at this point, but believe me, it's honestly a pain to do things just right, not too far and not too near, for a chain of portals winding around each world in a non-boring way. Though, like I say, now that I have a better idea of what locations on a portal are its "centers", this makes the task easier.
If you made it this far, then you're a Scientist. So, I'll pass on an interesting (and impractical) idea: a one-way chain of portals, with each OP->NP jump in the chain being a long distance. Normally you can take a long jump with OP->NP, but here you can go OP->NP->OP->NP and each OP->NP jump can be quite long.
The first OP to NP is trivial, so don't worry about it (or if you must, put the first OP1 at (-1023,5,-1023) for a nice big jump). Put a NP2 at say 125 high, call it (0,125,0). Put an OP3 portal at bedrock, (0,5,0), just to keep things simple (you could put it out as far as 128m in X and Z, which would actually help the next step - see below). These portals are linked and are 120m apart, purely vertically.
The interesting part is where you can put the next NP4 portal in the chain. Put the next nether portal horizontally from OP3. You can put this portal in the nether so that it's < 120m away from the OP in nether space and the OP will connect to it. OP3 goes to (0,5,0) in nether space. Say you put the NP4 portal at (0+119,5,0) - the distance between OP3 and NP4 is then 119m, just under 120m. Jumping 119m in nether space from OP3 to NP4 is the same as jumping 952m in overworld space. And you can continue this type of thing forever, but it's a one-way chain. Basically, jumping from NP to OP by a large vertical distance allows you to translate that distance into a very long jump, just short of 8x the height change, going from OP to NP.
You can do even better by offsetting OP3 away from NP2 and maximizing the distance between the two, but this doesn't add a lot. Say you put OP3 at (128,5,128) in overworld coordinates, still in the search range of NP2. When going from OP3 to NP4, the NP2 portal is (in nether distance) sqrt(16*16+120*120+16*16), a little over 122m. So you could go horizontally <= 122m instead of < 120m - minimal gain, getting you maybe another 24m in the overworld (though you did also get a nice extra bit of distance traveled going from NP2 to OP3).
Anyway, this should work, but I'd never build it. As soon as anyone built a nether portal anywhere along the chain, it would be broken. Note: there might be some off-by-one errors in the above, don't blame me if you try it (you mad fool!) and push the limits too hard.
I suspect I could set up two one-way chains in 3D (basically, I could form a ring), like two arcs (), with the height differential increasing with each OP->NP move so that each chain doesn't interfere with the other. That's for another rainy day.
Whaddyathink?
It's an interesting idea. You seem to be trying to deliberately manipulate the search ranges that the system uses, to decide which portal to go to, rather than putting each portal in an arbitary/precise location. One thing that didn't occur to me, is the idea that it might actually be possible to get fast travel through the Nether itself. If we could perfect the technique, we might be able to create a scenario where people have a cluster of portals more closely together as a more local fast travel network, but then having another portal a little further away, (due to the need for being outside the 33x33 threshold, if not using precise co-ords) to actually jump to another longer distance portal within the Nether itself.
My brain hurts just thinking about it at the moment, but I might have to try and do some experimentation with it at some point.
Thanks, this is just what I wanted to know (and so much simpler than I thought - I expected him to use the exact XYZ position of the character, why not?). Now maybe I can work out the kinks in my paired-portal system and get things just right - there's actually a flaw in one portal pair, I found out today.
Thanks also for the link, I hope it helps people out.