PortalPreview
See where a portal leads: a frozen 3D view of the destination inside the frame, with true parallax, a spiral reveal and smoke along the edge. Wooden and stone portals. Client-side.PortalPreview
Shows the place a wooden or stone portal leads to inside its frame. The destination is captured once as a frozen 3D scene with its lighting 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 scene is frozen by design: its lighting, time of day and particles are those of the moment it was captured. That keeps an open portal at about a millisecond per frame instead of rendering the destination live.
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.dllintoValheim/BepInEx/plugins/.
How it captures
- A portal's destination is captured when the portal is first linked, or with Capture mode
DuringTeleporteach time you leave through it, under the loading screen. - Only loaded places can be captured: walk through a new portal once and both ends get their view.
- Wooden and stone portals work in any pairing; the game links them to each other by tag.
- 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:
| Section | Setting | Default | Meaning |
|---|---|---|---|
| General | Enabled | true | Show portal views. |
| General | Hardware profile | Auto | Resolution, number of views and snapshots kept, from your video memory, RAM and CPU (Auto/Low/Medium/High/Ultra), or the individual settings (Custom). |
| Portal preview | Capture mode | OnFirstLink | When a destination is captured: when the portal is first linked, or on every teleport (DuringTeleport). |
| Portal preview | Approach radius | 15 | How close to a portal its view opens, in metres. |
| Portal preview | Always visible | false | Show views at any distance while in sight. |
| Portal preview | Spiral duration | 1.2 | Seconds the spiral takes to open or close. |
| Portal preview | Edge style | Ripple | How the picture meets the frame: Ripple, Vortex, Glow, Smoke or None. |
| Portal preview | Edge smoke | true | Smoke puffs along the seam between the view and the frame. |
| Portal preview | Hide game flames and fog | false | Hide the flames and dark swirling fog of the game's own connected-portal effect; its sparks, runes, light and sound stay. The picture then also sits at the front of the opening. |
Console (F5): frozenportal status, on, off, refresh (recapture nearby portals), cleanup (remove stale
saved scenes now).
Only errors reach the log. To see what the preview does (captures, loads, frame costs, why a view is not drawn),
start the game with the launch option -portalpreview-log.
Limits
- Wooden and stone portals of the base game. Portals added by other mods keep their normal look.
- A destination nobody has visited in this installation has no view yet.
- The scene is frozen: no moving creatures, time of day or weather inside the frame.
Multiplayer
Client-side. Each player captures the portals they use; nothing is sent over the network.
