Beta3 bug

Apart from sending an email to James I'm posting this here as well, because the TF mailserver is acting up again... I'm not sure if any email is coming through. Copy & paste:

The bullet tracing is all fubar when shooting at eg. crates: shooting straight ahead (no monsters around) at the lower part of a platform or other construction (say at a big crate, player at x = 0 shooting at lower part of platform, upper end x= 128) the bullet puffs actually appear at the upper edge of this platform (in example, at x = 128). Normally you would expect bullet puffs to appear directly in front of you.

I also noticed that shooting at this raised platform at a (roughly) 45 degree angle will mostly (but not completely) result in the appearance of bullet puffs in the normal position. The problem persist when playing vanilla doom2 levels.

Shooting solid (1s) walls does not give any problems.

Shooting projectile weapons also doesn't exhibit this problem, but when shooting with the plasma rifle at a LOW raised floor (around 32 units) the plasma explosion seems to be slightly above the firing line. I don't see this problem when shooting against bigger edges (64 units) or against 1s walls.

Anyone else noticed this, or is it just me?

Mord, you should make a demo demonstrating the bugs. I guess that could help Q & SoM figuring out what's going on.

The Merovingian said:
Mord, you should make a demo demonstrating the bugs. I guess that could help Q & SoM figuring out what's going on.

Erm, start up Eternity on Doom2 map01. Remove the monsters (kill, or -nomonsters option). Go to the green armor room with the four short pillars. Stand near one of the short pillars and shoot it with your pistol... see how the bullet puff appears at the top of the pillar, instead of straight ahead?

BTW, shooting at actual monsters does not seem to have been changed.

And why the hell does my post get the designation 'dumb' ..?!

[EDIT] Fixed. *Grumble*

Isn't that just the default for a new thread or PM? Might be nice to change it, since it is rather annoying.

Well, "dumb" is an appropriate description for >90% of all posts on these forums.

Hey, what do you know? it's a "bug" in the 3d clipping code which doesn't allow things to spawn below the floor of a sector.... fun

so anyway I guess I know what my next eternity project is....

Stephen

SoM said:
Hey, what do you know? it's a "bug" in the 3d clipping code which doesn't allow things to spawn below the floor of a sector.... fun

You sure..? Because I didn't find this behaviour when playing around with beta 2, which already had 3DMidTex (...not quite sure now, someone who still has beta2 will have to check). Also: note that I DO see the bullet puff appearing at the correct location when shooting the same wall under a 45 degree angle in beta 3, but not when shooting straight at this wall.

3D thing clipping, NOT 3DMidTex lines. The two have (almost) nothing to do with each other. If you turn off 3D object clipping on the Eternity Options menu (Options->Setup->Eternity Options), you will see that the erroneous behavior disappears, and toggles along with that option.

3D thing clipping is very complicated and so it has had the most bugs so far of any new feature. I suggest turning it off when playing levels not designed for it, for now at least. The setting doesn't affect the workings of 3DMidTex lines either, except that you obviously won't be able to walk under a monster that's walking on 3DMidTex lines if you have 3D thing clipping turned off.

Grazza said:

Isn't that just the default for a new thread or PM? Might be nice to change it, since it is rather annoying.

yeah, i'd like it muchly if there were no default set so it whines at you rather than letting you post a thread with topic 'dumb'. since i for one always end up forgetting to set it.

Quasar said:
The setting doesn't affect the workings of 3DMidTex lines either, except that you obviously won't be able to walk under a monster that's walking on 3DMidTex lines if you have 3D thing clipping turned off.

Which pretty much defeats the purpose of having 3DMidTex :( I still don't quite get it though.... in beta2 you also had 3D things, because I could walk under/over monsters. But I didn't experience those problems there.

Of course, a fix is highly appreciated ;)

Mord, yeah, I'll fix it after the next beta which should be pretty soon from what I hear. Hopefully after that I'll get skyboxes and such in, and fix the bug you mentioned and some other things. :)

I hope you like skyboxes there mord, I'm sure you will make the best skyboxes :)

Stephen

Thanks SOM!

And I sure do plan to use skyboxes... ESPECIALLY if combined with camera's :)

Meh, here's a shot of the bug, for anybody who cares...

I turned the brightness on my monitor to max and I still can't see a damn thing in that screen shot o_O

Oh and in case you all wanted to know, SoM and I identified the exact cause of this problem.

In beta 3 I made a fix to the 3D object clipping code that prevents monsters who just moved over/under an object from having that object move into their head or feet due to the monster's floorz/ceilingz not having been set properly.

However, the function that does the clipping, P_CheckPosition, also clips things against lines and sector floor/ceiling heights redundantly. Bullet puffs are NOBLOCKMAP, but this doesn't mean they aren't clipped against lines and floor/ceiling heights. Because the radius of the bullet puff extends into a 2S wall slightly, the game detects that it is touching the backsector of that 2S wall and so the bullet puff's floorz is set to the (in Mordeth's case) higher floor height behind the line.

The solution to the problem will be to make a function which clips things only against other things. I may be wrong, but I believe it is totally unnecessary to ever check for lines or sector heights at this particular place in the code. I'm going to let SoM fix this one, so he can find out for sure and then we'll determine the best course of action.

Quasar said:

I turned the brightness on my monitor to max and I still can't see a damn thing in that screen shot o_O

You have a shitty monitor then :-P

BBG said:

You have a shitty monitor then :-P

yeah i guess so. that shot looks pretty bright to me.

BBG said:

You have a shitty monitor then :-P

No, just a really dark one. It's always been that way and none of the settings help much (contrast, brightness, color temperature).

Quasar said:

No, just a really dark one. It's always been that way and none of the settings help much (contrast, brightness, color temperature).

Have you tried the settings of the graphics card? That helped me once with exactly the same problem where the monitor's own settings weren't able to help me at all.

Try Power Strip.