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Creating Portals

Pheotis edited this page Jun 3, 2022 · 7 revisions

Sign Placement

To create a gate, simply build portal that corresponds to a valid .gate format.

If you would like to use a custom activator material, place a button/coral on the corresponding control surface at this stage.
Next, place a sign (made of any material) on the remaining control surface. SG will not overwrite activators or signs!:
sign placement

Sign Contents

All stargates except for U gates (see this) are formatted in a manner that roughly corresponds to the following:

1. This Portal's Name
2. Destination Name
3. Network
4. Properties (Flags)

Line One: Gate Name

The first line of any stargate portal's sign is always what this gate will be called.
Gate names take the form of case agnostic strings, and support most unicode characters.

For example, if user1 wanted to make a portal at their spider farm, the first line of that portal might be:

spiderFarm



Line Two: Destination Name

If Provided

If a destination string is provided on the second line, the resulting portal will always connect directly to the specified portal.
For instance, if user1 wants to create a portal directly from their storage room to their spider farm, the first two lines of that portal might look like this:

storageRoom
spiderFarm


If Omitted

If the second line is left blank (no destination is provided), the portal will become a networked gate.
This means that, through a sign-based UI, the gate's users will be able to select any destination on the portal's network (see line three).

For example, if user1 wants to create a portal in their base that can connect to either their spider farm or their storage room,
the first two lines of that portal might look like this:

homeBase



Line Three: Network Name

Networks are groups of interconnected portals, with each group being assigned its own string as an identifier (network name).

Networks of portals are independent of each other, and therefore:

  • Fixed portals can only be connected to destinations that are on the same network.
  • Networked and random portals will only be able to connect to (scroll through) portals that are on the same network.

If omitted

If no network was provided, or if a user lacks the necessary perms to create a portal on the network they specified, stargate will fallback to the default network and their personal network.

The default (central) network is generally used for server utilities, and is included in the sg.preset.builder node.
Personal (username) networks are generally used by players for any purposes they wish; the sg.preset.gatemaker node includes permissions to use one's personal network.

In the examples above, as a normal player, user1 would probably have defaulted to their personal network.
As such, the gates created above would have resulted in this:

spiderFarm

user1
storageRoom
spiderFarm
user1
homeBase

user1

If provided

If a string is entered on line three, StarGate will attempt to create a portal on the specified network.
This action will be successful if the user has permissions to make portals on the specified network.

If we pretend that user1 had the permissions required to use the network 'example1' and created the following gate,
we would notice that it does not connect to any of the portals created above; this is because they are on separate networks.

otherBase

example1

If we create another portal on the example1 network, it would connect to otherBase, but not to homeBase

anotherPortal
otherBase
example1

Line Four: Flags

Gates can be customised through the use of flags; groups of letters that can be appended to the end of a sign to induce specific behaviours. A full list of available flags can be found here.

For example, the A flag and the P flag can be used to create this portal:

miningOutpost
homeBase
user1
AP

The A flag means that the portal is always-on (it does not need to be activated with a button).
The P flag means that the portal is private (only user1 is able to use/enter it).

Sign formatting

After the you have finished the sign (and therefore, the portal), you may recolour it;
SG allows signs to be modified through vanilla colouring mechanics (i.e. right-clicking with dyes).