PortalPreview

PortalPreview

Shows the place a portal leads to inside its frame: wooden, stone, and supported portals added by other mods.

The destination is captured once as a frozen 3D scene and kept on disk, and the frame becomes a window onto it: the view has true parallax as you move, opens in

a spiral as you approach, blends into the frame with a rippling edge and has smoke drifting along the seam.

The view follows the time of day and the weather at the destination: at night the far side is dark under the stars,

in the morning the sun rises there too. The captured scene stays frozen, while optional rain and snow move inside

the opening. A little of the destination's mist, snow, embers or dust can also drift out of the portal.

Between image updates the view is reconstructed from cached colour and depth instead of rendering the scene again.

Updating portal images still costs performance, especially while moving around a hub with several visible portals.

The cost depends on the scene, resolution, movement and hardware.

Requirements

• Valheim with BepInEx 5 on Windows.

Recommended (optional)

• FastLoading: faster portal travel and dungeon entrances, so stepping through a portal takes a moment

rather than a loading screen.

• ValheimVisuals: water, reflections, materials and ambient occlusion turned up within the game's own

ranges, for a better picture everywhere.

Install

• Close Valheim.
• Put PortalPreview.dll into Valheim/BepInEx/plugins.

How it captures

When a portal first shows its view: a portal shows the place at its other end, so that place has to be captured

first, and only a place you are at can be.

• A new pair of portals: travel through it once. The portal you leave and the one you arrive at are both captured

under that loading screen, and from then on both show their views.

• Two linked portals standing next to each other (a hub): both views appear a moment after linking, no trip needed.
• Portals built before installing the mod, or after a game update: the same as a new pair, one trip through each.
• Capturing a scene can pause the game, so travel captures run under the teleport loading screen and may extend it.

Linked portals standing next to each other (a hub) and manual frozenportal refresh captures run locally instead.

Capture time depends on the scene and any texture packs in use.

• Snapshot updates decides when an existing scene is replaced: WhenChanged (default) when you leave through the

portal and something around it was built, removed, grown or dug since its last capture; EveryTrip on every

departure (not again within two minutes); Once keeps the scene until frozenportal refresh. Outdated or incomplete

scenes can still request a recovery capture, including with Once.

• A capture waits for a fully black frame and may extend the transition. If it cannot start within three seconds,

travel continues with the previous snapshot. A capture already in progress can take longer.

• Wooden and stone portals work in any pairing; the game links them to each other by tag. Portals added by other

mods can show previews when their opening can be measured; this does not change their linking or travel rules.

• Saved scenes live in BepInEx/cache/PortalPreview/PortalSnapshots. Scenes and data nothing uses any more (a

portal torn down, an older game version, what a recapture left behind) are removed automatically once per

session.

Settings

BepInEx/config/ru.ivest.portalpreview.cfg, all live with Configuration Manager. The main ones:

The sections appear with number prefixes in the configuration file and Configuration Manager.

| Section | Setting | Default | Meaning |

| --- | --- | --- | --- |

| General | Enabled | true | Show portal views. |

| General | Hardware profile | Auto | Choose image resolution and the number of visible views and resident snapshots from your hardware (Auto/Low/Medium/High/Ultra). Resolution, Max visible portals and Max resident snapshots follow the profile at 0; a positive value overrides tha