Portals (And possibly pads) for plots?

[deathwinged]

Before I flesh out this topic, could a dev or someone familiar with the code of the game answer the following questions?

• How hard is it to add a new portal with city, guild, and/or settlements as possible destinations?
• Is it possible to have add an option with a variable destination to a portal?
• If yes to the above, can a gatekeeper be modified to change said variable destination?
• Is the game flexible enough to allow for a massive influx of new portals?

As a general idea, if the last three are answered 'yes', I would suggest the creation of a portal and pad combo that can be placed on a plot, and a portal room for dragon lairs. If the second and third points are a 'no', but the other two are plausible, then I would suggest adding a portal and portal room, minus pad, for plot toting convenience.

[AmonGwareth]

Not hard to add new portals and pads. But they cannot be built by players on plots/Lairs and they cannot have variable destinations.

[deathwinged]

I was aware of the current state of things; I was merely questioning the potential of such a variable destination system being added. Seeing as a portal is a selectable entity, much like shrines and every other plot item, and affectable by client-side mods such as setscale, it shouldn't be too much of a stretch to convert it into a plot item, if the game could handle a massive number of them being made in such a way. Further, to give a bit more information on the variable destination bit; the general idea is that players can speak to a specialized gatekeeper, who would attune them to that portal pad, which would be titled "Private portal" or some such nonsense, and change when the player attunes to another lair; this would be necessary so the portal lists wouldn't flood from all the possible new destinations. (Another option is to build a new portal in all major cities and Bristugo that leads to all player-made portals.) I would assume the coding quirk to automatically connect the new portals and pads would be difficult, however, but an alternative would be to have a staff member connect the portal on request, with a charge (Actual money and/or in-game coin, or possibly loyalty tokens, when those become available) for each portal a player wishes to build. Depending on the cost, certain players might buy several, and most plot owners would want at least one, as such a portal/pad combo would be a great boon to lairshapers and plot builders.

[Steelclaw]

From a technical standpoint, yes, you can have a portal and a destination pad on your plot, but they would be purely decorative. The bits that actually make a portal or destination pad work involve database entries that need to be identical on each shard (for the same technical reason that a given item must be the same on each shard).

In more detail: each pad gets added to one or more pad groups, a portal may have one or more pad groups as destinations. These memberships get re-synced with each content patch, thus any dynamic changes would get blown away (and probably make the patch fail on application). Attunement just says that you're allowed to use a specific pad group; attuning does not add any destinations to the portal list -- those are static.

You're correct in that dynamic destinations can be implemented with coding, but that's not a trivial task. Whether or not dynamic teleport gates and pads make a good design decision aside, from a labor allocation standpoint, the R&D would exceed our available resources and hinder efforts on more far-reaching projects.