[.96] Bug : Seeker missiles hurting launcher species

[Zippy]

This is something I came across working on the next version of my wad.

I have my roommate's head as an enemy. One of the things he does is fire out small tornados which are run of the mill seeker missiles. So I'm testing changes I just made in DECORATE. Spawn one head... works just fine. Spawn two heads. Everything is still good. The tornados home in on me. The heads can't hurt each other; their tornados merely explode on each other doing no damage. But during this I noticed something weird. At some point, a tornado hit one head and it entered the pain state. So I set up a test...

1. Spawn a single head and run around it in circles, building up a large supply of tornados to follow me around.
2. Once I have like 30 or 40 tornados following me, kill the head.
3. Stop, and let the tornados catch up to me.
4. Before the tornados hit me, spawn a new head.

The result? Once the tornados hit the new head, they killed it. It seems if the actor who initially launches seeker missiles dies, the still active missiles will do damage to whatever they hit, regardless of species. I certainly don't think this is intended behavior. DECORATE seeker missiles shouldn't hurt the species of the launcher, regardless if the original actor who fired them is alive or dead. It's probably only with DECORATE, because this doesn't work with Revenants (if the Revenant who shot the missiles is dead, they still won't hurt other Revenants.)

[Graf Zahl]

Question: Does yoir head disappear completely when dying? If so this is an unavoidable limitation of ZDoom's thinker mechanism. If something gets removed all references to it have to be cleared to eliminate invalid pointers. This also means that your missiles no longer have an owner. Simple workaround: If it dies let the sequence end on the invisible sprite TNT1 A without letting it disappear completely.

[Zippy]

Ah. Alright. A counter-question though: Will there be any drain on the system over time? Obviously there probably won't be much in ways of rendering slowdown since it's an invisible sprite, but after time and say a few hundred killed heads in the same room, you don't think think there'd be any real problem? Probably not... I mean, we've seen maps with some pretty astronomical numbers of monsters before.

And besides, even if there would be a problem, I could have it change to the invisible sprite for a minute or two before disappearing. It would still be possible to have the tornados do damage, but it would be far less likely.

[randi]

If you're worried about having too many build up, make the last state use TNT1 as suggested and give it a long delay. By the time it disappears, its missile ought to have already hit something.

[Graf Zahl]

Ah. Alright. A counter-question though: Will there be any drain on the system over time? Obviously there probably won't be much in ways of rendering slowdown since it's an invisible sprite, but after time and say a few hundred killed heads in the same room, you don't think think there'd be any real problem? Probably not... I mean, we've seen maps with some pretty astronomical numbers of monsters before.

If there's a really large amount you might experience slowdowns. But to get there you need several hundred invisible corpses.

The worst thing I have ever experienced was a room with a huge amount (a few 1000) invisible bridges in one large sector. In that particular case the sector's thing list became so long that it slowed down the game. But this was really an extreme case.

[Cutmanmike]

1000+ Bridges? Nasty. Having anything NEAR that many things on the map slows my pc down like crazy.