[Mark]

I haven't narrowed it down to a specific version yet but the popular flashlight mod based on Darkus's original mod has stopped working. No light is shone. I have tested in my Graveyard and Suburbs mods so far. I re-bound the key for it in the menu just to rule it out. No good. This is using the latest eduke32 from a day or 2 ago.

I'm also noticing some of my swing doors that haven't been touched for many months in an area that hasn't been touched for months are glitching and showing parallaxed floors as though they are crossing over sectors.. And the sequence that the map starts with is not running it's con commands. IDK if those are related to the newer eduke or not. I'll be doing further testing and report back.

Flashlight and doors issues are gone using 9305 from Jan of this year. So the problem is fairly recent. I'll bisect to find the start of the problem. However, I have noticed again that polymer lights disappear if you exit to the menu and reload the map. So there is more to hunt down.

[TerminX]

Polymer is currently under semi-active development and some things may be broken. I think for that flashlight mod I'll probably have to check what it's doing in CON and see if there's a way I can get it working again without having to change the mod any. Polymer lights have interpolation etc now and the way the mod is moving the light around probably isn't compatible.

[Mark]

9782 is the last good working flashlight and the swing door parallaxed floor was juuust starting to barely flicker. Next revision 9787 has no flashlight and has wonky door floors.

I still need to find the version that polymer lights disappear on map reload from the menu.

[Jimmy]

Good to hear Polymer is being worked on.

[Mark]

For whatever reason, I'm no longer getting the problem of the polymer lights disappearing on map reload on any revision. Lets hope it stays that way. It seemed to happen seldom and randomly so I kind of ignored it.

[TerminX]

Can you put one of the glitchy doors into a separate .map file and attach it here? One of the changes I made to Polymer replaces the polygon tessellation code with something different and it seems to be having trouble with a couple of maps.

[Mark]

I gave a very close look at the doors that were glitching. The pivot corner verts were so close to the wall corner verts it was hard to see they were separate. Those doors were made by the previous mapper before I took over. I always space mine out a teeny bit further. So I turned off grid locking and I spaced them like I normally do and no problems. I guess I was just lucky they weren't glitching in previous eduke32 revisions. I wonder if the other doors you've mentioned have been built with verts closer than recommended.

If I go any closer than this it will glitch. I moved the pivot SE out of the way so you could see the verts. Its usually packed tightly in that corner. Before my fix the vert bodies were partially overlapping instead of touching like they are now. This is maximum zoom in Mapster.

So IMO your changes are fine and glitching doors may be poorly made. There is no need to get any closer than this.

Attached thumbnail(s)

• 

[Aleks]

Mark, on 23 November 2021 - 09:57 AM, said:

I gave a very close look at the doors that were glitching. The pivot corner verts were so close to the wall corner verts it was hard to see they were separate. Those doors were made by the previous mapper before I took over. I always space mine out a teeny bit further. So I turned off grid locking and I spaced them like I normally do and no problems. I guess I was just lucky they weren't glitching in previous eduke32 revisions. I wonder if the other doors you've mentioned have been built with verts closer than recommended.

If I go any closer than this it will glitch. I moved the pivot SE out of the way so you could see the verts. Its usually packed tightly in that corner. Before my fix the vert bodies were partially overlapping instead of touching like they are now. This is maximum zoom in Mapster.

So IMO your changes are fine and glitching doors may be poorly made. There is no need to get any closer than this.

If the changes would break swing doors that are spaced closer than that, it would glitch a lot of maps which make doors like that. I also usually leave just 1 unit between doors and the lintel, if the SE sprite is place correctly (tip: turning off effector descriptions in 2D mode), it works well. Also when your door glitchs, it's good to DNDEBUG the map with the door in open state then check in Mapster what went wrong.

[Mark]

Leaving the gap at 1 unit away like you do would be too much for me. As you can see I usually have them less than 1/2 unit away, closer to 1/4 unit away. So if mappers are making them even closer than in my pic I think they are asking for trouble.

[Mark]

Still waiting for the flashlight fix. I also noticed today that the SE light flickering feature from High Treason's Confetti mod doesn't work either. Possibly other parts of that mod too but I only noticed flickering so far because I'm using it in a project I'm working on.

[Danukem]

Mark, on 24 July 2022 - 10:06 AM, said:

Still waiting for the flashlight fix. I also noticed today that the SE light flickering feature from High Treason's Confetti mod doesn't work either. Possibly other parts of that mod too but I only noticed flickering so far because I'm using it in a project I'm working on.

Hi Mark, I'm trying to get myself motivated to work on my big projects again, so I could use a little warmup exercise. Can you link me to the mod that is supposed to be working? Maybe I can hack a workaround.

I will not be looking into swing doors, though -- that shit is no fun.

[Mark]

Graveyard TC used the flashlight and Decay used the flashlight and flicker. My present project Suburbs is also using flashlight and flicker.

What I discovered in Suburbs and likely applies to the other projects, not tested yet,
the flashlight SE50 will shine but only when facing in one direction.
Player look side to side, but the light stays put.
Look up and down the light follows as it should.
Move and the player shadow flickers in the light.
This last bug goes back further than recent eduke revisions. In projects where the flashlight otherwise works, when player's Z position goes down a certain amount from default start like a flight of stairs for instance, the flashlight stops shining. Return to the starting level or go higher the light shines fine again. My workaround was to raise the entire map up however many Z units was needed. I think Mblackwell might have also been working on a fix at the time. I don't recall if it was implemented or not. It was a long time ago.

I'll have to find where in a Decay map the flickering is used.

I have no issue with swinging doors these days because I space my verts a little further from each other than the amount that causes a glitch.

https://forums.duke4...__1#entry215698

https://forums.duke4...__1#entry232700

[Danukem]

Before I look into that: has no CON coder looked into it and tried to fix it? Not Mblackwell or Darkus?

[Mark]

I never contacted Darkus. MB was knee-deep in Ion Fury and still is I think. Only one I contacted was TX thru this thread and the reply in case you missed it was:
Polymer lights have interpolation etc now and the way the mod is moving the light around probably isn't compatible.

In the middle of the flicker con is an event for something else and can be ignored. I'm not sure why it ended up in there.

Attached File(s)

•  flashlight code.txt (1.6K)
  Number of downloads: 189
•  flicker.con (3.38K)
  Number of downloads: 190

[Danukem]

I spent about 30 minutes on it and it's broken AF. I tried various things and can't get it to work. Code that used to work for me does not work now. Just another reason to not use polymer I guess. Good luck with that.

[Mark]

I'll just have to stay with older versions. There a number of other glitches with newer which I posted in another thread.
Thanks for your effort.

[Danukem]

Mark, on 25 July 2022 - 03:48 AM, said:

I'll just have to stay with older versions. There a number of other glitches with newer which I posted in another thread.
Thanks for your effort.

The reason I gave up after 30 minutes, aside from the fact that I didn't have a lot of time, is that nothing I did seemed to make any difference. The light was like a dark purple and barely visible, and would not respond in any way to my code -- it would not change angle to be the player's angle, changing its pitch (up/down) just made it disappear, changing the RGB values made no difference, etc. Now there is an important difference between my method and the one provided. In my method I *spawn* the light, whereas in the code provided there is a light already in the map which is then manipulated. The spawn method worked perfectly for me in the past and my old mods that used polymer all do it that way. For me this is essential because the mapper won't know how many lights are needed since that is heavily code effect dependent, so if I can't get it to work with the spawn method then polymer is dead to me.

[xlnt]

A flashlight mod would be so damn awesome. Would make some cool horror episodes.

[Mark]

Its been used to good effect in a handful of mods already. I want to continue using it so I hope it gets looked at soon. Its been about 10 months since the original post and 2 months since my followup.