0001304: Additional flags for A_SpawnItemEx from ZDoom r4188

MantisBT - Zandronum

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Date Submitted

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0001304

Zandronum

[All Projects] Suggestion

public

2013-03-22 06:10

2018-09-30 22:19

Reporter

Mr. Repo

Assigned To

Torr Samaho

Priority

normal

Severity

feature

Reproducibility

N/A

Status

closed

Resolution

fixed

Platform

OS Version

Product Version

1.0

Target Version

3.0

Fixed in Version

3.0

Summary

0001304: Additional flags for A_SpawnItemEx from ZDoom r4188

Description

I am aware with the policy of not backporting anything out of sequence, but I figure I'd give this a whirl anyway just because of how big of a breakthrough I feel this is.

A_SpawnItemEx quite literally yesterday had a few flags added and well, I'll just paste over the descriptions from the ZDoom wiki.

SXF_CLEARCALLERTID - If the actor is spawned successfully, this actor (the one that called A_SpawnItemEx) will have its TID set to 0.
SXF_MULTIPLYSPEED - Multiply the spawned actor's velocity by its Speed property.
SXF_TRANSFERSCALE - Transfers the current Scale factor of the spawning actor to the spawned actor.

Along with the ability to directly assign TIDs to the spawned actor.

Here is the ZDoom forum topic discussing the added flags:
'http://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=30623 [^]'

Breaking down all 4 points with some of my thoughts of how they could be applied:

SXF_CLEARCALLERTID - This would allow for altered behaviors depending if another actor was successfully summoned. I don't feel I need to go on here and list the specific possibilities with players, inventory, items, monsters, heck even random decorations that could benefit from this. It would make a lot of inconsistent inventory item based coding 100% definite instead of hoping things work out for the best, are always in ideal situations or using hacky ACS for checks. I'm sure almost every single modder could and would benefit from using this alone in some way considering it would guarantee that spawns are always successful.

SXF_MULTIPLYSPEED - From what I can understand, it would be a great way to keep consistency on spawned actors without having to redefine with multiple actors and doing a bunch of inventoryitem checks.

SXF_TRANSFERSCALE - Pure optimization. This would make life easier for larger and smaller actors to take the size of whatever spawned rather than having to make countless new actors that would have the same code over and over with the only difference being the size. Makes things cleaner, more efficient, and like other flags, would allow certain circumstances for varied sized objects to be spawned without having to resort to countless amounts of varied actors.

TIDs - To my knowledge, there is no way to spawn an actor via decorate with a TID unless it's defined in their states. This would allow for greater control and variance without countless lines of redundant code. This also would be great to throw effects onto specific actors depending on what spawned it without having to resort to ACS.

I feel without going too far into specifics that these are good enough reasons to backport this. The possibilities and ease of use just from these few additions are seriously limitless for us modders.

Steps To Reproduce

Additional Information

Here's the link to the revision with the extra flags

'http://www.zdoom.org/Changelog/4188/files [^]'