Institute Portal Gun
ElPolloAzul

The Pitch

* Upset with not being able to see what's at the top of some building or water tower?
* Yearn to visit the REAL stands of Diamond City?
* Desire to have a quick and easy way to retreat to your settlement from
some dungeon overloaded with loot -- and don't want to call a
vertibird?
* Need to disappear your foes quickly to a hostile area? Tend to appear
during the night in a place you shouldn't be?
* Feel like you should be able to get the jump on people?
* Fancy abducting your friends and making them walk all the way back
home?
* Could benefit from being able to throw grenades in one place only to
have them explode in another place?
* Want to make a real big mess?
* Or do you just want to steal everything in sight?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, the Institute has the
versatile tool for you!

The Who What When Where and Why

Deep within an ice chest in a meat freezer, there is a cancer, known as
the Portal Gun...
With each shot, the Institute Portal Gun conjures up one of two
entangled mystical, magical portals!

One is blue. The other? Orange.

Use this gun to ascend to new heights, perform daring raids, and annoy
settlers in endless loops.
If you can figure out how to solve puzzles or perform testing with it in
this game, well, good for you.

Here's how it works:

Shoot one portal onto some object or surface, step close to it, and be
warped to the other portal.
Teleportation works between and within interiors, large exterior places,
and in the Commonwealth at large.

But be careful: watch where you warp!
And it's not just you who can be transferred to the other side...

Change portal colors by unequipping and reequipping the gun.

Here's where you can find it:

The Institute has wisely sequestered this awesome power in a place few
would think to look: its agents have secreted the gun and a special
holotape in Diamond City, in an ice machine which is itself in the Meat
Freezer atop Choice Chops!

Also from The Institute labs: Project Holdall, your holotape uplink to
convenient temporary remote storage of items in the Cloud (of radiation,
that is).

Equip the Portal Gun with the Loot Coprocessor to gain even more
irresponsible power: the power of taking everything in sight for later
retrieval at your convenience.

In a word: "Emergent" gameplay!

Manual type stuff:

Installation

No special instructions, archive contains 1 ESP and 2 BA2s.
Prior to uninstalling, make sure you clear out the remote inventory.
Its world location is next to the icebox where you get the gun.

Where is this thing specifically?

For more specific guidance, when you first enter the middle of Diamond City (not the Stands),on the right is the All Faiths Chapel, and next to it is the butcher stand (Choice Chops).  If you've got to the front door of the Dugout Inn you've gone too far. You want to get on the roof of Choice Chops to access its meat locker (one way is to not completely go up to the stands and walk along the edge of the stadium seating). In
the Meat Locker is the ice container with the portal gun.  This is a small room with hanging meat and frost, so it's pretty distinctive once
you are inside.

How do I change portal colors?

If you unequip and then re-equip the portal gun (through the menu only) the colors on the gun should change. When it's blue, you should be able to fire a blue portal. Do the same to switch back to orange. Sometimes when a save loads, the right color mod
might not be equipped; you should also be able to get back in proper phase by this same equipping and un-equipping.

A melee bash (Alt) will also do this: this is the preferred method since it minimizes out-of-color-change phase cosmetic issues.

As an easter egg, if you have a item in the world grabbed, then bash, if you release the grab it will throw the item out in front of you instead of just dropping.

General Cautions

* If you use the remote storage, clear it out before you uninstall!
* Dying, getting stuck, breaking NPC behaviors when you displace things, losing things is (WC4:) The Price of Freedom. 

Some notes on buggy behavior and engine limitations:

Fast Travel and Jump / "Falling" Animation

This glitchy behavior has been around for some time in the Havok enabled Gamebryo games...

From time to time, a warp which results in an incomplete fall animation
will stick the player temporarily with a falling state. If you want to
fast travel or jump, these are things you cannot do while the game
thinks you are falling; another telltale sign is that the character may
also amusingly hold their hands up when interacting. This problem can
more rarely happen in the vanilla game in any situation in which you
fall abruptly or are ragdolled severely. Usually this issue is solved
pretty handily with this mod by using the Portal Gun to precipitate one
or two more falls to clear the "floating walk" state. Sometimes menu or
area transitions or ground cover also resolves this issue.

Controls

You switch portal types by equipping and reequipping the gun. This is
admittedly inconvenient: if there was a sensible way in native scripting
to capture melee attacks or capture other keystrokes this would have
been ideal. It may be more convenient for the moment to assign the gun
and another weapon to quick keys to accelerate this process.

I have looked into multiple ways of doing this. If you come up with something
particularly crafty, let me know. Otherwise, I plan to put a version of this out
for the Script Extender at some point, which should make this more convenient.

And yes, something like ammo-type switch (a player-initiated event tied to the gun,
but triggered before the weapon firing) would have been
quite nice! A way to capture a weapon bash event, as pointed out below,
would also work.  It turns out that swapping an object/weapon mod on a
gun requires an unequip-reequip cycle anyway. It's nice, for example,
that you can detect if the player is sneaking slightly after the portal
is opened, but this doesn't let you perform an action upon the player
sneaking. There are a handful of other approaches, with their own
issues. It would do good things for weapon mods not requiring script extenders
if Bethesda patched an alternate fire mode switching mechanism in at
some point.

Assets: Nostalgia Deficiency!

Now, to address the elephant in the room, if anyone does come up with a nice,
well-rigged, nicely textured mesh to approximate the original gun
from Portal, I would be happy to help realize a version of this mod
which uses the attractive and nostalgic assets. I don't have the expertise or the proper
tools for the time being to give you all the best run at this, so veteran weapon mesh artists, animators, and NIF configurers
may be interested in bringing the Portal gun and the authentic portal effects to life.

Community Videos

A good feature overview comes from user "Total SideQuest"


And if you want visual guidance, there's this from EpicCRAZY WOLF:


Thanks to everyone who makes videos with these mods.

And, finally, hope you all have fun with this.