Portal© FAQ

Where can I get Portal?

One of the newer clients to appear, Portal is quickly gaining a reputation in performance that compares it to other such clients as zMUD. Portal is the creation of a company called GameAxle and offers many unique and diverse options. Although Portal has been made in a unique and bright way, it still offers some of the more easy to use commands such as triggers, aliases and speed-walks and has superb speed without jumps while playing games such as Materia Magica. This client is rather large, in excess of 10mb, but Materia Magica has recently been adding support for a few of the more complex options, and soon it should be able to let you hear music while playing in spectacular world, as well as a variety of other multimedia to enhance your game play.

To download Portal, visit the GameAxle website at http://www.gameaxle.com.

How do I install Portal?

Once you've downloaded and installed the client (and hopefully the upgrade), go to the folder in which you installed it and open Portal.exe. This will open a small display box with a few options.

How do I connect using Portal?

First, if you wish to try Portal without setting it up completely for Materia Magica you can simply hit the Quick Connect button. This will bring up a box asking for connection information; in here place materiamagica.com as the Host and place 4000 as the Port. Then the Accept button should un-gray itself, click it. A small box will popup that says Connecting, then a new window will open up connected to Materia Magica.

If you wish to customize the Portal client to suit your character on Materia Magica, after opening the Portal client click on the Player Profile button. This will bring up a display box with several options including Add Profile, Edit Profile and Delete Profile. Click the Add Profile button. Once in here it asks for several fields, most of which have to be filled out to successfully create a Profile. Place your character's name and password in the first two boxes at the top that ask for them. After that put Materia Magica in the MUD box and place materiamagica.com for the host, with 4000 for the port. In the website box place www.materiamagica.com. Once that's all done you can 'Create New from Scratch', this will create the profile in the main display of the client, which opens up each time you run the program. But another nice feature in this area is the Login Script, most other clients don't offer this and it can be used for many things. Since Materia Magica gives you a list of choices once you log in, most of the time you will hit 1 to enter the game, so under the PLAYER PASSWORD lines you could place the number 1 and it would auto log you in without requiring you to press the 1. This can save time and makes it's a little bit easier. If you added scripts for it to run on connection, and are happy with it hit Create Profile from Scratch. The profile will now be added to the list in the display box, hit close then either double-click the profile you want to connect to, or click once then hit the Login Online button.

Does Portal cost money?

Although Portal usually would cost money to use after a 30-day trial period, if you entered all the correct information once connected to the server it should say something like 'This session has been sponsored by Materia Magica' and is then free for the user.

How do I change Portal's Colors?

The clients colors by default are rather bright, but can be easily changed through the tab at the top called Options then go to Program Options, under the Text Options tab is a variety of options. To change colors, press the small gray button besides the color box then left click the box with which color you want the actual text to be, right click on another color to change the background color.

Does Portal have Triggers, Macros and Aliases?

Portal does provide each of these commands, although it's a little tricky to use these. They are usually used to make game-play a little bit easier. Please note: Triggers are generally classified as Illegal, and should probably not be used.

What are Aliases?

The small red A, on the top-left side of the display next to the key is for Aliases; Aliases are for input commands (When you type something); like suppose you wanted to make one for talking, you could alias say to add a color or say something before what you want to say for a tag.

What are Macros?

The yellow M next to the small red A is for Macros; Macros are scripts that run one a specific key has been pressed. For instance, you could Macro the F1 key to get a skin of water from your bag, drink from it and put it back in.

What are Events/Triggers?

The blue E is for Events/Triggers; Triggers are things that happen once something on the game is sent to your client. For instance you could have a trigger to say hello to someone when they say hello to you. Also to make a quick trigger, the blue E with a lightning bolt next to it can be used. This is simpler than using the main display for Events.

How do I enable sounds with Portal?

Materia Magica provides Portal sound support in order to play sound effects through the client. To hear sounds, you will need to download and uncompress the following "sound packs", which contain the sounds that the game will reference during play. They may be downloaded using the following URLs:

http://www.materiamagica.com/sounds/mm_sound_pack1.zip
http://www.materiamagica.com/sounds/mm_sound_pack2.zip

Once you have downloaded the files, unzip them into the Portal "Media\Sounds" directory. In a standard installation this would be: c:\Program Files\Portal\Media\Sounds. Make sure you have SOUND enabled within the game, which can be easily done by typing SET SOUND ON. To disable having sound commands sent to you, use the SET SOUND OFF command, or turn the sound off from within your client.

If you are having problems getting the sounds in the above referenced sound packs to work, it may be because MP3 support is not fully enabled on your machine. Try downloading the WAV versions of the sound packs and installing those into the appropriate directory:

http://www.materiamagica.com/sounds/mm_sound_pack_wav1a.zip
http://www.materiamagica.com/sounds/mm_sound_pack_wav1b.zip
http://www.materiamagica.com/sounds/mm_sound_pack_wav2a.zip
http://www.materiamagica.com/sounds/mm_sound_pack_wav2b.zip

The WAV versions of the sound files are around 16MB each, whereas the MP3 versions are much smaller, so the MP3 versions are preferred if you can use them.