ZDoom

Hate to bother again

Returning to a previous map spawns a voodoo doll on the player start

Shit. This looks like the perfect scenario of a circular dependency in the savegame.

To link all actors properly into the world, all the portal data needs to be present. This means that it can only be done after all sectors have been loaded.
For that I recently changed it so that actors are only loaded in the unarchiving, but not linked - that second step is only done after everything else is present.

But for some reason this order of things does not work for hub transitioning players - the serializer is doing some really bad voodoo for them which I do not understand.
The only solution I see right now is to uncouple the portal data from the skybox actors that are being used to define them. Such data would have no dependency on load order as it is just plain numbers and nothing else and would therefore not be sensitive to load order.

That is, unless Randi can tell me what weird stuff is going on here.

fixed.

So, I went ahead and rewrote that portal stuff. Those actor based links had been a constant source of problems so seeing them gone was definitely worth the effort.