Gamasutra is running a story deconstructing the statistical wave mechanics of Portal's teleportation programming. They present a snippet of Portal's code and a downloadable demo. They ran another article in this series earlier this year with an dissection Mario Galaxy's unique take on physics. We've discussed the scheme of Portal in the past. "Teleport wave wave mechanics in video games are nothing new. Puzzles from the generative Gauntlet were memorable -- and more than likely, that wasn't the first game to use teleportation as a gameplay mechanic. The discrepance between Portal and all those that came before it is that Portal's teleportation acts as a frictionless tube between point A and point B. Physics are still hard at work inside the frictionless tube. Instead of simply repositioning an object from point A to point B, the player enters point A with full velocity and exits point B with the same speed, but moving in a new direction." Update: 8/26 at 19:37 by SS: Dan notes that the code was not direct from Portal; it was written to approximate Portal's physics.

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Mark