EDuke32 Scripting (CON coding)

[DeeperThought]

I need to be able to display space at the beginning of a quote, so that when I put quotes together using the string commands, there is correct spacing between the words. Is there a character I can use that will display as a space?

[Hendricks266]

Perhaps TAB? " "

[TerminX]

Just blank the tile for one of the characters you aren't using anywhere else.

[DeeperThought]

OK, I'll try blanking a tile. But now I have another problem. I want to display death messages that say who got shot by what belonging to whom. Unfortunately, it seems that at least some custom projectiles do not correctly set htpicnum or ifwasweapon. For example, I have a BFG weapon that kills enemies within a large radius. The BFG projectile that comes out of the gun does not itself spawn a hitradius, since this would kill friends as well. Instead, it spawns a special actor that spawns other actors on the enemies, and these fire very short range explosive projectiles called "BFGHITRADIUS". I have it set up so that the BFGHITRADIUS is owned by the player who fired the BFG...this is necessary for doing the scoring. However, when someone is killed by it, their hitpicnum is not set to BFGHITRADIUS. I have a similar problem with my proximity mine pipebombs and a lightning storm weapon. Here is a projectile definition, if that helps:

defineprojectile BFGHITRADIUS PROJ_WORKSLIKE 16450
defineprojectile BFGHITRADIUS PROJ_EXTRA 149
defineprojectile BFGHITRADIUS PROJ_HITRADIUS 768
defineprojectile BFGHITRADIUS PROJ_VEL 1
defineprojectile BFGHITRADIUS PROJ_RANGE 1
defineprojectile BFGHITRADIUS PROJ_SPAWNS NOTHING
defineprojectile BFGHITRADIUS PROJ_ISOUND NULLSOUND
defineprojectile BFGHITRADIUS PROJ_SOUND NULLSOUND
defineprojectile BFGHITRADIUS PROJ_CLIPDIST 0
defineprojectile BFGHITRADIUS PROJ_CSTAT 32768

[DeeperThought]

I could use some information about the movesprite command. I am trying to use it on my bots but the results have not been good so far. The syntax is:

movesprite ACTORID XVELS YVELS ZVELS CLIPMASK RETURNVAR

I have assumed that XVELS is the velocity on the x plane, which could be positive or negative, depending on whether you want the actor to move towards higher or lower x coordinates. Same for y and z. Is this correct? Second, I have assumed that the velocity scale is the same as that used by the move commands (where the running speed of the player is about 300 or so).

[TerminX]

Yeah, that's correct. Here's some code I use for strafing enemies:

    ifvarg MCOUNT 0
    {
        getactor[THISACTOR].ang TEMP
        addvar TEMP 512
        cos MX TEMP
        getactor[THISACTOR].ang TEMP
        cos MY TEMP
        addvar MCOUNT -1
    }
    else ifvarl MCOUNT 0
    {
        getactor[THISACTOR].ang TEMP
        addvar TEMP 1536
        cos MX TEMP
        getactor[THISACTOR].ang TEMP
        addvar TEMP 1024
        cos MY TEMP
        addvar MCOUNT 1
    }
    shiftvarr MX 7
    shiftvarr MY 7
    
    movesprite THISACTOR MX MY ZERO CLIPMASK0 RETURN

[DeeperThought]

OK!

You're shifting 7 bits to the right...I guess that means your strafing actors move at a speed of 128. In my case, I'll need to use it for more than just strafing, but I think I see how to do that. Thanks.

[DeeperThought]

Originally Posted by DeeperThought

I think I see how to do that.

No, actually, I don't. What I'm trying to do is use movesprite to move the actor towards a specific destination, rather than have it strafe.

EDIT: I've got it working now.

[DeeperThought]

I'm having a problem with movesprite: My bots can't go upstairs when using it; they get stuck even on extremely short walls. They don't have this problem with the regular move command.

[Hendricks266]

You need to use a decoy actor\projectile or hitscan to see how far away a wall is and its height. If there are stairs, then you'll have to adjust the ZVEL argument of movesprite.

[DeeperThought]

Originally Posted by Hendricks266

You need to use a decoy actor\projectile or hitscan to see how far away a wall is and its height. If there are stairs, then you'll have to adjust the ZVEL argument of movesprite.

I tried using a negative zvel and it didn't help, although it did make the bots bob up and down when running, which looked sort of realistic. Currently I hitscan for walls, which sometimes helps, and sometimes doesn't: In many cases, the bot will be right up against a short wall but the hitscan reading comes back negative.

One difficulty is that the ifnotmoving condition is not triggered when the bot is using movesprite to move. Normally, I use that condition to detect when the bot is stuck so that it can jump or adjust its angle.

[Mblackwell]

Don't set any zvel, simply use the "fall" command. I believe that should work, though I could be wrong.

[DeeperThought]

Originally Posted by Mblackwell

Don't set any zvel, simply use the "fall" command. I believe that should work, though I could be wrong.

I already use the fall command.

The situation is this: I have no problem making the bots strafe for short distances, which allows them to dodge while continuing to face the enemy and shoot back. But, I also need to make the bots follow a complex bot path for a long distance and fight at the same time, without going too far off of the path. This is mainly for two reasons (1) A bot needs to be able to retreat when it is outgunned, without turning its back to the enemy, (2) A bot holding a flag needs to be able to take the flag to its destination while fighting off attackers. The only solution I can think of involves using movesprite. But when I do that, the bots keep getting stuck on things like short walls and garbage cans. The techniques I use to jump over/ avoid these things when a bot is using move commands don't seem to work when it uses movesprite (for example, ifnotmoving remains false, even when the bot is motionless).

[DeeperThought]

I'm trying to give my bots the ability to jump out of water. Not swim, mind you, just jump out of it when they are hip deep or so. They, uh, don't want to do it. I've tried move commands, as well as movesprite. I've even tried a fake jump where their z coordinate is set manually. Nothing works. Once they step into a pool, they become locked in. I do know how to prevent them from entering a water sector in the first place, but I would rather code them to deal with water instead of just avoiding it like a bunch of cats.

EDIT: So I gather the problem is that when an actor is in a water sector, they are not where they appear to be in the game, because they have been transported somewhere else. Since there is no sector over sector, there is no hope of getting them to move out of the water sector by changing their z coordinate. I guess what I would need to know is which sector is "above" the water sector (i.e. the one that looks like it is above it). Can I get this information out of the sector struct? I hope this makes some kind of sense...I still don't understand BUILD very well.

EDIT2: Okay, I think I've got the concept now. To enable my bots to use teleporters, I have code that stores the IDs of sectoreffectors with lotags of 7, and the IDs are stored as pairs, so that if a bot encounters one of these transporters, it knows where the matching transporter is and can teleport to it. When the bot is in a water sector, it can find the sectoreffector in that sector that has a lotag of 7, then, when it reaches the ceiling of the water sector, it changes its sector to that of the matching sectoreffector that isn't in water. Nasty.

[DeeperThought]

How does one get an actor to activate an elevator? The operate command doesn't seem to work. I can have my bots check the lotag of a sector to determine whether it is an elevator and which type, and I think I can even have them figure out how fast it is, but none of this helps them use it unless they can activate it. I know Chip asked about this a while back, but I don't know whether he found a solution. There's the floorstat and ceilingstat members of the sector struct that looks promising...

[Hendricks266]

Floorstat and ceilingstat are bitfields, and speaking of which…

How do you perform a bitstrip? I've heard of people using the "andvar\andvarvar" command, but I am clueless.

Also, how does the starttrack command work? I've gotten it to compile with these parameters:

starttrack <something>

…but there was no effect.

[DeeperThought]

Is this right?

operatesectors <actor> <sector>

(For getting bots to use elevators).

[TerminX]

No, you have the parameters backwards.

[DeeperThought]

Yeah, it's me again, having con coding problems as usual. Still trying to resolve the old stuck sprite issue, so I tried this to see what would happen:

onevent EVENT_EGS

getactor[THISACTOR].picnum temp
switch temp

case FIRELASER
insertspriteq
break

...

Now, I didn't expect this would be the best solution to keeping FIRELASER sprites from hanging in the air, but I thought at least it would be relatively harmless. WRONG. All kinds of actors started randomly disappearing, as though they were FIRELASERs that had been put in the deletion que. I've never used the insertspriteq command before, though, so maybe I'm using it wrong. Maybe it is not supposed to be used on sprites with certain statnums ?

[TerminX]

It's not supposed to be used on any sprite that will ever be removed from the game by any means other than the deletion queue.

[DeeperThought]

Originally Posted by TerminX

It's not supposed to be used on any sprite that will ever be removed from the game by any means other than the deletion queue.

Oh, I see. The game was trying to remove the sprites with the IDs that had been put in the que, but by then the FIRELASER sprites had already died, and it ended up removing different sprites instead. And probably other horrible things could happen as well...

[TerminX]

Correct. It removed new sprites that spawned with the ID that was in the queue after the original sprite was removed.

[DeeperThought]

Here's an oldie but goodie: What is the practical difference between ifcansee and ifcanshoottarget ?

It's clear from looking at the original cons that there are supposed to be times when the first is true and the second is false. For example:

state boss3runenemystate
  ifcansee
  {
    ifactioncount 3
    {
      ifcanshoottarget
      {
        resetactioncount
        sound BOS1_WALK
      }
      else
        ai AIBOSS3SEEKENEMY
    }
  }
  else
    ai AIBOSS3SEEKENEMY
ends

It leaves me scratching my head when I try to replace the code with something equivalent that isn't player-centric (so that the monsters will go after bots too). Until I know better, I am going to treat ifcanshoottarget as ifcansee plus a distance requirement.

[TerminX]

It's ifcansee plus a distance requirement plus a couple of line of sight checks to keep the monsters from shooting each other.

[DeeperThought]

Originally Posted by TerminX

It's ifcansee plus a distance requirement plus a couple of line of sight checks to keep the monsters from shooting each other.

Thanks.

[DeeperThought]

I've discovered something odd...I'm not saying it's a bug, but it's an odd little fact about how the game works that is making things difficult.

The condition ifdead is not always true when the actor in question is dead. With all of the standard enemies, it is true when the monster first dies, and it remains true while the monster is going through the death animation, but when it reaches the lying dead frame, ifdead becomes false again. (I have tested this by using a special state and displaying vars). I believe this is because, all of these actors use the command "strength 0" when in their lying dead frames. My guess is that setting the strength on an actor automatically invalidates the ifdead condition (or maybe just setting it to 0 or greater?)

EDIT: Of course, this makes sense when you consider that frozen monsters also have a strength of 0. If ifdead were true in those cases, then frozen monsters would be considered dead. So maybe the simple fact of the matter is that monsters are only considered dead when they have less than 0 strength? In any case, the ifdead command isn't very useful if monsters lying dead on the ground don't count as dead (which they don't).

[TerminX]

Um, how would that make anything difficult? You can just use getactor to retrieve the health value and check if it equals zero yourself...

[DeeperThought]

Originally Posted by TerminX

Um, how would that make anything difficult? You can just use getactor to retrieve the health value and check if it equals zero yourself...

I should have said made things difficult. It's not a problem now that I know what is going on. It did make things difficult when my code wasn't working right and I didn't realize it was because ifdead returns false while the monster is lying dead on the ground.

If strength is zero, the monster is probably dead, but it could also be frozen. There have also been cases where monsters are alive and kicking with zero strength, even though they haven't been frozen (apparently they sometimes take just enough damage to get them down to zero, but not enough to kill them.) I guess the best way would be to have the monster set a var on itself when it goes into its death animation. This var could then be checked thereafter to see whether it is dead.

[DeeperThought]

Once the spritenoshade command is used on a tile, is there a way to turn it off again? Or, better yet, is there a way to toggle an individual sprite back and forth between being having its shade set by its sector and not?

EDIT: I guess you just use spritenoshade, and then manually set the sprite to the sector's shade when you want it.

[Lord Misfit]

Strangely enough, I've seen stuff concerning monsters still fighting if they have exactly 0 Strength. The reason is because I have my targetting system displaying the stats of the monster as long as they have more than 1 strength. If a hit takes them to exactly 0, they no longer display their stats, but still run around. So that's interesting.

[DeeperThought]

Originally Posted by Lord Misfit

Strangely enough, I've seen stuff concerning monsters still fighting if they have exactly 0 Strength. The reason is because I have my targetting system displaying the stats of the monster as long as they have more than 1 strength. If a hit takes them to exactly 0, they no longer display their stats, but still run around. So that's interesting.

Yeah, that's what I was talking about before:

Originally Posted by DeeperThought

If strength is zero, the monster is probably dead, but it could also be frozen. There have also been cases where monsters are alive and kicking with zero strength, even though they haven't been frozen (apparently they sometimes take just enough damage to get them down to zero, but not enough to kill them.)

[Lord Misfit]

I know, I just brought that up so I can confirm that you weren't crazy about it. ;P

[DeeperThought]

I want bullets to make ricochet sounds, but only if they are hitting walls, floors and ceilings, not if they are hitting sprites. Is there something I can check in the SHOTSPARK1 actor code to find out what it is hitting? I can check the floor distance and ceiling distance, and it works fine, but if I check for walls, with

ifawayfromwall nullop else

...the else clause always activates, even when the shotspark is not near a wall.

[Dr. Kylstien]

Originally Posted by DeeperThought

I want bullets to make ricochet sounds, but only if they are hitting walls, floors and ceilings, not if they are hitting sprites. Is there something I can check in the SHOTSPARK1 actor code to find out what it is hitting? I can check the floor distance and ceiling distance, and it works fine, but if I check for walls, with

ifawayfromwall nullop else

...the else clause always activates, even when the shotspark is not near a wall.

As I understand it, ifawayfromwall will react to *any* sector wall, even if you can't see it, for example, a wall that seperates two sectors with the same floor and ceiling heights.

[DeeperThought]

Originally Posted by Dr. Kylstien

As I understand it, ifawayfromwall will react to *any* sector wall, even if you can't see it, for example, a wall that seperates two sectors with the same floor and ceiling heights.

That totally explains it. It makes the command pretty useless, since most maps have child sectors with invisible walls all over the place.

Anyway, the correct answer is:

     getactor[THISACTOR].htg_t 8 spriteid
       ifvare spriteid -1
          state ricochetsound

And if you want to do make the sounds appropriate to the type of surface, you need to get a different htg_t member and check the picnum, basing the sound choice on that.

[DeeperThought]

I was working on monster ai, and I came across this, which AFAIK I did not modify:

state checkdronehitstate

  ifdead state dronedead
  else ifsquished state dronedead
  else
  {
    sound DRON_PAIN
    ifbulletnear
    {
      ifceilingdistl 64
        ifrnd 48
          ai AIDRONEDODGE
      ai AIDRONEDODGEUP
    }
    else
      ai AIDRONEGETE
  }
ends

Note the yellow text. It looks like someone forgot to put an else in between the two ai commands. The way it is here, those if conditions are doing nothing, and the drone will always dodge upwards, even when near the ceiling.

[KillerBudgie]

Hey Deeperthought. I wonder if a new version of your mod will be out in time for Christmas.

[DeeperThought]

Originally Posted by KillerBudgie

Hey Deeperthought. I wonder if a new version of your mod will be out in time for Christmas.

That depends on how much time I'll get to work on it in the next week. Right now, I have nothing new worth mentioning, aside from some improvements to the HUD.

[DeeperThought]

I thought of a command that would be useful for me, and perhaps other modders. The command would be similar to findnearactor, except that instead of just returning the ID of a near actor, it would return how many actors of the specifiied picnum are within the find range. It would be nice bonus if it could return at least some of their IDs as well, if not all of them.

[TerminX]

If you want to do that, just loop through all of the sprites yourself in the CON code and manually do a distance check on each of them which match the picnum.