The three virtues of a programmer: Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. – Larry Wall
Legacy:Teleporter
A Teleporter is a method by which an actor (usually a Pawn (UT)) can be sent from one location to another. Teleporters are typically used to connect two disjunctive locations on a level, but this comes nowhere near the extent of what they are capable of being used for. Teleporters can also be used to send players to other levels, or even to send them to static Unreal servers found somewhere on the internet. For a simple tutorial on using them, read Teleportation Basics.
Here is a list of the configurable properties of a Teleporter. Due to the significance of the URL property, it will be listed first.
Contents
URLs
The URL property determines where the actor will be teleported to. This can take several forms:
<blank> TeleporterTag Mapname#TeleporterTag?peer unreal://server.site.name.com:portnum/levelname#teleportername
Destination
If the URL property is left blank, then the Teleporter is set up to work only as a destination for other Teleporters. Set its Events -> Tag property for other teleporters to point to.
Same map
To make a Teleporter connect to another Teleporter on the same level, simply enter the Tag of the destination Teleporter into the URL property.
Local map
To make a Teleporter connect to some Teleporter on another level, use the form Mapname#TeleporterTag?peer, where:
- Mapname is the name of another map to load,
- TeleporterTag is the tag of a destination Teleporter in this map,
- peer is a keyword telling the engine to load another map.
Note that the Mapname parameter must not contain the .unr extension at the end. Also, the current map and the map that is being referenced must be in the same folder, preferably the Maps folder or some other folder accessible to the engine.
Net
To make a Teleporter connect to a server on the internet, use the form unreal://server.site.name.com:portnum/levelname#teleportername. A few of these parameters are optional.
- unreal:// is the identifier that Unreal's servers use to be recognized by web browsers. This allows you to enter URLs into web pages, so that either Unreal or UT can connect directly to that server from a hyperlink beginning with this identifier. When entering a URL into a Teleporter's properties, this parameter is optional.
- server.site.name.com is the web address of the server that Unreal or UT will try to connect to. It can be an actual text URL, but this is usually just a set of IP values.
- portnum is the port number that should be used to connect to the server. For example, multiple Unreal engine games on the same computer can be used to run two or more servers at once, so they must use different port numbers so that a player trying to connect to one server doesn't end up on the other (since any two such games are running servers from the same computer, then the two servers will have the same IP address, but different port numbers). In many cases, this parameter is unneccessary, but there are a few instances where it must be specified.
- levelname specifies a specific level to connect to. By default, this is left blank, so that the player will automatically enter the level that the server is running. For teleportername, the same is true. When this parameter is left blank, the player will simply spawn at a random PlayerStart in the level.
Properties
- bChangesVelocity, TargetVelocity
- If bChangesVelocity is set to False, then the Actor that enters the Teleporter will exit the destination teleporter with the same velocity as it originally had. If True, then the Actor's velocity will be changed to match the TargetVelocity vector when it is successfully teleported. (Note: these variables are applied to the destination teleporter, not the starting teleporter.)
- bChangesYaw
- If set to True, this teleporter will alter the direction an incoming actor faces. The change in yaw is relative to the incoming actor's yaw prior to teleportation. The amount of change is determined by the Movement -> Rotation.Yaw of this teleporter. Because the end result Yaw is not absolute, this is only slightly useful to keep a player from facing a wall after he is teleported. The custom YawTeleporter class fixes this behaviour.
-
- For this to work in network games, set Advanced -> bNoDelete to True.
- bReversesX, bReversesY, bReversesZ
- If any of these is set to True, then that particular component of the teleported Actor's velocity will be reversed. (Note: these variables are applied to the destination teleporter.)
- bEnabled
- This determines if the Teleporter is currently turned on. Triggering the Teleporter will toggle it on and off. Turning a Teleporter on when it has actors inside it will cause the Teleporter to try to teleport those actors.
Triggering
Teleporter toggles the bEnabled property when triggered. See Trigger Systems for ways to use this.
Known Subclasses
- FavoritesTeleporter – Broken, don't use
- DelayedTeleporter (custom) – Deactivates for a short time after usage to prevent telefragging.
- VisibleTeleporter
- YawTeleporter (custom) – Sets the player's yaw to a fixed value when leaving the teleporter
Related Topics
Other things that can teleport:
Wormbo: This page seems to cover only the UT Teleporter class. Should it be renamed to "Teleporter (UT)" or should it be updated with UT2k3 info. (If the differences aren't too big.)
Psyk: It doesn't look like anything has changed in 2kx. All this info is relevant in any case.
