The 'self' that you can access from the qc side is not used (at least in the standard source) in any of the engine code, it always begins with it's own reference to an entity passed as a parameter, and then set in the global_qc_self variable (not it's actual name in the source). So I don't think that could be your problem.

Is it possible that some of the entity links you have run through entities which are removed? The quake engine has a 'lazy remove' paired with a 'thorough spawn' function. Only 5 or 6 entity fields are cleared on removed entities, just enough that they are no longer transmitted to clients. When the entity slot is reused, the spawn builtin goes through and zeroes all of the fields.

Although it makes sense to not go to the trouble of zeroing all of that memory until necessary from a performance point of view, it can make bugs intermittent. If your code relies on a reference to an entity which has been removed, then it will more than likely perform correctly until something uses that entity slot. The trouble is now that the cause of the bug is separated from it's first effect by an unpredictable length of time, making it very hard to diagnose. 

i use
if (self.someEntityLink)
{
self.someEntityLink.think = SUB_Remove;
self.someEntityLink.nextthink = 0.1;
}
which i felt was pretty safe.

the problem seems to be centered around accelerating movers.
i'm still using helper entities to control velocity but it seems as if after a few minutes a helper will just become removed (when i check the helper's edict it is either free or a new entity).

however, this also happens with a custom lightning entity. the custom lightning entity spawns a chain of models to simulate the lightning effect and cleans them up when the effect is over. somehow that master entity just dies sometimes leaving the models in the game.

both of those entity's think loops seem to be solid so i can only guess something outside of their thinks are killing them. 

You could put a wrapper around the remove function to try and work out exactly what is removing them. In defs.qc rename the builtin definition #15 to

void(entity e) remove_builtin = #15;


You can then define a function called remove which has extra behaviour before calling remove_builtin. I'd probably add a boolean field to the entities you want to monitor.

.float donotremove;

void(entity e) remove =
{
�if(e.donotremove)
�{
��dprint("Entity of class '");
��dprint(e.classname);
��dprint(' was removed!);
�}
�remove_builtin(e);
}

This doesn't give you much debugging information though, it still requires you to guess what just happened. It would be better to get a stack trace, but the only way to get one of those is to crash the map. I'm not sure how much of a stacktrace you get by calling error() or objerror(e). I do know that you'll get one by creating a runaway loop though, so something like:

void(entity e) remove =
{
�if(e.donotremove)
�{
��eprint(e);
��while(0){};
�}
�remove_builtin(e);
}


That ought to give you plenty of information as soon as one of these entities gets removed. Just remember to clear the donotremove flag before actually removing them! Also, it should be obvious that this kind of code shouldn't go in a release build... 

That of course should be while(1) in the code above, so that it loops forwever rather than not at all. 

that's a great idea, thanks! maybe i should create a wrapper for spawn() so that donotremove is set to true by default, or do the inverse have it as 'safetoremove' defaulting to 0.
anyway, nice idea to abuse the stack trace engine feature. ^_^
it's like teaching progs new tricks but for engines. :P 

I was figuring you'd only apply donotremove in the spawn functions of the two entities you were trying to debug, otherwise you've got to worry about your game crashing every time a missile hits a wall and stuff! Wrapping spawn and remove is a really great trick with lots of uses, I'm really grateful to frikbot for showing me the trick of redirecting builtins. 

you know how, when you're riding a platform that's moving upward, your viewpoint sort of sinks down a bit?

currently, console prints (like bprints or stuffcmd bf) are causing the view sink effect to reset each time. every time there's a bprint, the view height resets to the standard height and starts to sink again.

i have the feeling i've fucked something up pretty badly. :P 

apparently, the bprint thing is happening in stock quake too. this must be some setting in fitzquake because it doesn't happen in aguirre's quake.

will investigate... o.0 

 

i'm still unsure exactly what's causing it... if someone wouldn't mind checking this out, an easy way to test this is to bind a key to 'god' and then load up e1m1. hit the button for the first lift and let it lower.
when it starts to raise back up, repeatedly hit the key you bound to god mode. each time the screen should reset to the normal view height before sinking back down.

this happens in fitzquake and quakespasm. 

i only noticed this happening because i have some debug code that outputs a ton of text repeatedly to the screen. with that many outputs, the screen practically shakes when riding a lift up.

it's not like it's really a big deal since when you play normally outside of developer 1 mode, you don't get the outputs and so don't get the shaking.

on a possibly(?) related note, monsters riding a lift up appear to not interpolate their positions if they are walking on the platform? 

on a possibly(?) related note, monsters riding a lift up appear to not interpolate their positions if they are walking on the platform?

yeah, I noticed this recently. Must fix!

As for the view jerkiness on lifts... I've seen this but it didn't notice a connection to console prints. Will investigate. 

possibly helpful:

it is not strictly bprints that cause this. when i turn the console spam off, every so often the view will jerk rarely. 

I got this urge to try and write my own Quake map editor for fun (don't hold your breath) and I am already stuck at the first hurdle (for this reason).

I don't know why, but I thought I would try and load a wad file first. Just so I understand the format I thought I'd read about it and implement it myself. I've also got the code from the engine to look at, so it's not super difficult, but I am having a weird problem.

When trying to read the individual lumps that contain the image data for textures, if I try and read the width or height value I just get nonsense UNLESS I add a weird 16 byte offset to the pointer I am using.

example:
LUMP_t* lump = (LUMP_t*)(waddata + lumpinfos[lumpno].filepos + 16);
cout << "width: " << lump->width << ", height: " << lump->height << "\n";
will output the correct width and height, but if I remove the 16 byte offset, it doesn't work and I get gibberish.

My problem is that I have no idea why I need to add the 16 byte offset, and am worried that it might cause problems down the road if I don't understand why it's there.

Aside from that offset, everything seems to be as I expected. 

My tip: try and implement some simple editing functionality as quickly as possible because that will keep you motivated. Don't write struts code like reading wad files. Write your internal model for brushes and write a simple renderer for that. Then, improve on that code. If you have to write code that doesn't draw anything on screen for weeks, you will very likely lose your motivation quickly. 

thanks for the tip. I know it can be really boring to write code that doesn't draw stuff, but for some reason I like writing file loaders and figuring out how stuff works. My plan for tonight is to get wad textures displaying on screen and then I want to go onto the exciting brush stuff and improve my 3d math knowledge (I forgot most of it... oops).

I don't think I will be able to write an editor as awesome as Willem's Toetag, but if I get even 1/4 of the way there, I will have learnt a lot :) 

Brushes are represented in map files as the intersection of a number of half space equations (each face is such an equation). You must convert this representation into a representation that you can use to draw stuff, i.e. polygons which you send more or less directly to OpenGL. There are several techniques to do this by calculating the extreme points of the solution of the original system of (inequality) equations. These techniques are computationally optimal, but very hard to implement correctly. I suggest you don't touch that stuff for your first version.

Another very simple way of converting a brush to polygons that you can draw is to start with a cuboid polyhedron (represented by its vertices and edges) with maximum dimensions and then simply split the brush along the planes which are defined by the faces. This is easy to do because you just have to intersect all edges of the polyhedron with the splitting plane. You'll end up with a polyhedron that has the same shape as the brush, but you can easily determine the face polygons from that data structure. This is computationally inefficient, but since you are not dealing with a lot of data, it's fast enough.

Another tip is to use the vertex / edge representation only for rendering, not for manipulation of the underlying brushes. The brushes should remain in their original representation and should be manipulated in that representation as well, This way you can use the very high precision that the half equation intersection representation offers (and don't have to convert float vertices back to int). 

implement rounding errors or some other form of sloppy calculations so it will feel just like using qoole! 

I got my wad loader working ok and it renders textures from a 570 texture wad just fine. The code is a total mess and I still don't know what that weird 16 byte offset is, but I got Quake textures displaying on screen in sexy Quake colours, so I'm happy for today. Next step will be a map loader :)

I made a map compiler (not to bsp, but to a much simpler format that just uses polygons) before, so I still have some code that can create polys from brushes somewhere. I was going to use that. Pretty sure it uses the clipping method. The first solution sounds difficult :)

this?: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convex_polytope#Vertex_representation_.28Convex_hull.29


Math on wikipedia is always extremely hardcore sounding. 

at my old brush compiler code and it appears to take a series of 3 planes to generate a vertex and then adds the generated vertex to a vertex list for the each face involved in its calculation. It iterates through this until it's done and looks very inefficient.

But if it works, I don't care :)

When editing a map, most of the brushes just sit there unselected. I would imagine the average user doesn't touch more than a handful at once, and even then most of the operations are probably moves. 

anyone who's studied this could answer a question?

if i've got a monster who has an 80% chance to attack when his checkAttack function is called:

if (random() < 0.8)
attack!

does that really mean he has an 80% chance to attack at all times? or is it more like 10.7% chance to attack every second? (0.8 ^ 10 since animation rate is 10fps)

probability has always been pretty impenetrable for me. :S

as a result, i tend to rely much more on 'cooldown' (attack_finished) timers to regulate monster attack rates. 

The code you posted means he has an 80% chance to attack each frame. One of the best ways to understand what this means is to look at the probability that the monster will start attacking before the 2nd, 3rd, 4th frames etc.

The easiest way to do the calculation is to flip the question on it's head. What is the probability that we are still not attacking on the 2nd, 3rd, 4th frame? For that to be the case, we must have failed to attack in all the previous frames, and the chance of that is 0.2 each time. Since each trial is independent, we can multiply them together, as follows:

Frame 2: 0.2 * 0.2 = 0.04. 4% chance of not attacking after the second frame

Frame 3: 0.2 * 0.04 = 0.008. A 0.8% chance of not attacking on the third frame or earlier.

Frame 4: 0.2 * 0.008 = 0.0016. Scarcely a 0.1% chance that we are not attacking 4 frames of considering it.


So it's pretty certain we'll attack within the first 3 frames, our code is largely creating variety in behaviour over a range of just 0.3 seconds. Even if we changed the probability to 0.5 we'd still expect the monster to attack quite quickly: 1 / (2^10) is the probability that we wouldn't have attacked after 1 second - which works out at > 0.1%.

Using attack_finished as a cooldown is probably the best way to to long pauses out of your monsters, if you want them to choose between attacking with a missile or closing the distance with the player. 

that makes a whole lot more sense. i confused myself over why the chance to attack would go down over time, which is just stupid because every time we check, we are giving a new chance to attack. 

I have a feeling I could find this if I dug through the Quake source, but are the lengths of key/value pairs for map entities limited to 16 and 32 chars respectively? If not is there some other limit? Does anyone know.

On top of that, if anyone happens to know the max number of:
entities in a map
faces per brush (guess this is compiler limited)
key/value pairs per entity

I'd love to know them :) 

http://celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=60429 see post #2