: I imagine a "cyberspace portal" would be a kind of terminal. You
: don't physically walk into cyberspace, you log into it.
Like System Shock (AFAIK)? I guess that'd be easier to explain than 'the reality level is a mite thin here', though the preview still gives the impression that you were meant to walk in. Mind-avatars?
: You could probably accomplish a lot of it by having an almost-exact copy of
: the level geometry overlapping the real level geometry, and using teleport
: terminals as the entrance and exit. Without a complete copy and paste
: functionality in a level editor, though, that sounds like an enormous
: amount of work.
: The only part that sounds difficult to implement is that when you die in
: cyberspace, you just pop back to where you were in real life. Possibly
: some complicated Lua could handle that: some flag is set when you use the
: cyberspace terminal (and unset when you terminal back out), and your
: current health (and inventory?) status is saved, then while that flag is
: set, if your health drops below some tiny fraction above nothing, you are
: relocated to the entrance terminal and your health is set back to the
: stored value (and the flag is unset).
That DOES sound like a lot of work (and extremely fiddly). While reading this, I imagined a third set-up where you put two almost-identical pieces of geometry on separate areas of the same map and just have certain switches/terminals in one bit shift things around in the other, but simply bringing up the map would completely wreck the illusion... (And would probably still be fiddly)
