[Mblackwell]

If they have code running they aren't static models and take up additional processor time. I have a loop that runs every tic and only updates objects with a specific statnum (by using headspritestat/nextspritestat) and there's no effect on performance, other than the improvement of not having them as actors (which is much slower). You can process a few thousand objects this way much faster than if they were individual actors. This doesn't work for a good number of things, but for anything static it's great.

[Diaz]

Done. Performance does seem good, but the amount of models usable for this code (those with no collision) isn't that high.
So I guess it's working in an optimal way now. Thanks guys!

[Helixhorned]

Fox, on 26 April 2013 - 03:59 PM, said:

Hmm, that's a trick one. Try this:

include this line somewhere before your actor code...

gamevar TEMP 0 2

Where you see the command "fall" in your actor, replace with:

  ifvare sector[THISACTOR].lotag 1
  {
    iffloordistl 8
      setactor[THISACTOR].zvel 0
    getsector[THISACTOR].lotag TEMP
    setsector[THISACTOR].lotag 0
    fall
    setsector[THISACTOR].lotag TEMP
  }
  else
    fall

The proposed hack is pretty good, but the advice to copy-paste a dozen of lines of code is not. One should always aim at reducing redundancy. In this particular case, it's easy: just put these lines into a CON state.

Trooper Dan, on 26 April 2013 - 10:58 PM, said:

^That's an interesting idea for a solution, but it would be much simpler (and probably more reliable) to simply use "ifonwater spriteflags 16" which should prevent the sprite from teleporting into the underwater sector.

These two refer to different aspects of water: Fox's hack would prevent wading in water and your proposal would stop teleporting the actor. I haven't tested either of them, though.

[Dr. Kylstein]

This doesn't work:

onevent EVENT_GAME
    setprojectile[KNEE].extra 100
endevent

Why?

[Fox]

Because the KNEE is not defined with defineprojectile, it is hard-coded.

[Danukem]

Fox, on 01 May 2013 - 06:56 PM, said:

Because the KNEE is not defined with defineprojectile, it is hard-coded.

Correct, but he can mod it the old fashioned way.

In USER.CON, find:

define KNEE_WEAPON_STRENGTH             10

and change the value to 100

[Dr. Kylstein]

Trooper Dan, on 01 May 2013 - 09:45 PM, said:

Correct, but he can mod it the old fashioned way.

In USER.CON, find:

define KNEE_WEAPON_STRENGTH             10

and change the value to 100

That isn't desirable because my mod is a collection of mutators. In the end, I just defined a new projectile.

[Fox]

If you are using a mutator, you could add this:

actor KNEE <strength> enda

Of course an alternative is to redefine the KNEE using defineprojectile, but that way it would loose some hard-coded features, such as increasing the strength if you are using Steroids.

[Jblade]

Just a silly question, but I want to make sure it's accurate before I go ahead - if I want to remove a percentage of a number, there's no command to do that I have to work it out manually right? So for instance say TEMP8 is equal to 25:

	ifvare PERSONEL_RESEARCH[8] 2 // player has thermal weaving? reduce damage by 20%
		{
		setvarvar TEMP7 TEMP8
		mulvar TEMP7 10
		subvarvar TEMP7 TEMP8
		subvarvar TEMP7 TEMP8
		divvar TEMP7 10
		setvarvar TEMP8 TEMP7
		}

That should reduce it by 20% right?

[Fox]

What an ugly code, you should simply multiply it by 4 and divide by 5.

[Jblade]

Yeah ok so there is a better way to do it then, please don't call my code 'ugly' when I'm asking for help.

[Fox]

Yo code so fat when you get on top of her your ears pop!

[Mblackwell]

Btw for percentages in general, if you wanted 20% of 5 then X = (5 * 20) / 100.

So to add 20% you'd do X = (5 * 120) / 100

[Helixhorned]

For gamevars, two practically undocumented but used in-the-wild flags are 1024 (NODEFAULT) and 131072 (NORESET). This post is about the former.

What bit 1024 is likely supposed to do is to prevent resetting the gamevar's value to the default/initial one on various occasions such as starting a new game. For global and per-player gamevars, it could be e.g. used to hold information about gained mod-wide achievements.^[1] However, currently, the value of such gamevars would still be (always) restored by savegames or (if NORESET is clear) when restoring mapstates.
While I'm not sure whether to call it a bug (there was never a specification), I still think it's not the desired behavior. Suppose you kill the final boss and win $ 10⁶ as an award, but because you liked the final fight so much, you load up the last savegame and attempt to beat it once more. This time, you fail though, and all your money is lost .

What I intend to do in LunaCON is to make NODEFAULT gamevars persist during the entire duration of a session, with the only option of restoring it being via readgamevar. (I'm not yet sure how the interaction with NORESET should be.) Because this is an externally visible change to gamevar behavior, I'll probably also backport it to C-CON. Are there any objections to this plan? It should be noted that in all the mods that I'm batch-testing CON-compilation on, there are only a total of four uses of that bit.

----------
^[1]For per-actor gamevars, it has a somewhat technical use, the original one being rather meaningless. It can be set to prevent actor variables being reset on spawn (this includes the initial one from premap), so that they can be manipulated before: e.g. from eventloadactor code.

[Fox]

By the way, is it possible to explain the purpose of the other flags? I know what 0, 1 and 2 are for but the Wikia is not very clear about the meaning of the others.

[Helixhorned]

Fox, on 24 May 2013 - 11:50 AM, said:

By the way, is it possible to explain the purpose of the other flags? I know what 0, 1 and 2 are for but the Wikia is not very clear about the meaning of the others.

They're not part of the official API and thus off-limits to users. LunaCON will disallow setting them unless we specify the meaning of each one clearly and unambiguously. No more guessing and half-baked workarounds!

[Edit: it's not my intent to criticize anyone's work, but I hope it's clear that exposing functionality that is not 100% understood is just a dead end.]

[zazo]

is a command exist to make a zoom of the screen (usable for a sniper weapon for example)...
another command to set a "hit radius" for a melee weapon ? the defineprojectile xxx PROJ_RANGE seems to set the depth but not a radius around the player...

[LAW]

setactor[THISACTOR].xrepeat X
setactor[THISACTOR].yrepeat Y

I have used this within eventloadactor and it does nothing. Including these strings with ifactor inside EVENT_GAME also does nothing. The only thing which have worked is old style sizeat at the beginning of the actor code, but it resizes the actor upon seeing the player, which is bad. What am I doing wrong? :/

[Fox]

First of all, you have actually set the gamevars X or Y to an actual value, right? Because you have posted a small fragment of code.

zazo, on 30 May 2013 - 02:30 AM, said:

is a command exist to make a zoom of the screen (usable for a sniper weapon for example)...
another command to set a "hit radius" for a melee weapon ? the defineprojectile xxx PROJ_RANGE seems to set the depth but not a radius around the player...

Making an explosive hitscan would require more work.

[Danukem]

Fox, on 31 May 2013 - 12:09 AM, said:

Making an explosive hitscan would require more work.

Not too much, though. You could set PROJ_SPAWNS to an actor that explodes with whatever hitradius you want.

[Fox]

That wouldn't work very well. The PROJ_SPAWNS seems to be flawed, besides half of the time it spawns inside of walls canceling the radius explosion. Also it would not return the ownership of the actor firing the hitscan, thus multiplayer score would not work.

[LAW]

Fox, on 31 May 2013 - 12:09 AM, said:

First of all, you have actually set the gamevars X or Y to an actual value, right? Because you have posted a small fragment of code.

Of course, I am not that stupid Anyway the whole thing looked like this:

eventloadactor MOSQUITO
setactor[THISACTOR].xrepeat 10
setactor[THISACTOR].yrepeat 10
enda

Why it doesn't work? WHYYYY?

Maybe it's because in erampage, but it should work...

[Fox]

Is MOSQUITO a hard-coded actor?

[LAW]

Fox, on 31 May 2013 - 10:36 AM, said:

Is MOSQUITO a hard-coded actor?

Hard-coded or not, why is it resized freely by "sizeat", but not by the code from above?

[Diaz]

If it's hard-coded, the hard-coded stuff happens after eventloadactor, so it's being reset to the hard-coded size

[LAW]

Dam. Thanks though.

[Fox]

 LAW, on 31 May 2013 - 10:56 AM, said:

Hard-coded or not, why is it resized freely by "sizeat", but not by the code from above?

It shouldn't.

[blizzart]

 zazo, on 30 May 2013 - 02:30 AM, said:

is a command exist to make a zoom of the screen (usable for a sniper weapon for example)...
another command to set a "hit radius" for a melee weapon ? the defineprojectile xxx PROJ_RANGE seems to set the depth but not a radius around the player...

That´s something I´m also interested in.

[zazo]

 Trooper Dan, on 31 May 2013 - 09:18 AM, said:

Not too much, though. You could set PROJ_SPAWNS to an actor that explodes with whatever hitradius you want.

Yes, but it muste be a hitradius that not hurt the player, only enemy. And a "knee" weapon style, not explosion ...

[LAW]

As we know in Duke Nukem, RESPAWN "passes" its pal to the spawned sprite. The same thing happened in the original Redneck.

I have an enemy, which does a few things upon dying when spritepal 30, 31 or 32. It works, when that enemy is put on the ground in Build. However, when it is spawned by a RESPAWN it does nothing and judging from its spritepal dependant behaviour it has pal 0. I've come with an idea to put the foe on the conveyor belt, where it could be moved into the silent teleport. But somehow it doesn't bother the conveyor belt's motion and it doesn't fall into the teleport's chasm even though it has 'fall' command in its code. Changing 'actor' to useractor enemy' also doesn't change things.

I've tried to code it out in EVENT_GAME. Maybe my logic is wrong, but I will show, what was done:

gamevar OWNER 0 0
gamevar PAL 0 0

ifactor MAMA
getactor[THISACTOR].owner OWNER
ifvare OWNER RESPAWN getactor[OWNER].pal PAL
setactor[THISACTOR].pal PAL //OR ifvare PAL 30 spritepal 30

It doesn't work. Is there a workaround to have that enemy appear on demand and do the special actions?