PortalPreview
See where a portal leads: a 3D view of the destination inside the frame, lit for its time of day, 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 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 scene itself stays frozen (no moving creatures or particles), which 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 | Follow time of day | true | Light the view for the time of day and the weather at its destination now. False keeps it as captured. |
| 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), lighting (compare the lighting the mod computes where you stand with the game's own).
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 or particles inside the frame.
- Time of day: the distant landscape and clouds were captured as pictures and are only brightened or darkened; falling rain or snow stays as captured; dungeon interiors keep their captured lighting; raids are not shown. Each lighting step redraws a visible portal's capture over a few frames, at most once per 10 seconds.
Multiplayer
Client-side. Each player captures the portals they use; nothing is sent over the network.
Problems and feedback
Write to me on Discord: https://discord.com/users/683075123816824940. Attach BepInEx/LogOutput.log from the game folder, or from the profile folder with a mod manager (r2modman: Settings → Browse profile folder), and say what you did when it happened. If a portal shows no view, add the output of frozenportal status
typed in the F5 console next to it (the console needs the -console launch option), and start the game with
-portalpreview-log so the log says what the preview did.
