Help: Weird problem with weapon damage and finding my 'self'

[OneManClan]

[Note: This problem refers to CustomTF, where a player can have up to three 'Grunties', soldier bots, which he personally controls]

[Note: I'm still a newbie so please don't hesitate to 'dumb down' all explanations ]

There's something weird going on with something I'm trying to code. It's too complex to go into ALL the code here, so I'll give an alternative, simplified, demonstration version:

Let's say we have a function which makes the Player's Grunty say something every time his owner damages him:
[code]void(entity Grunty) OuchMessage1 =
{
sprint(self, #PRINT_HIGH, Grunty.netname, "

[MauveBib]

"self" changes all the time, it refers to the entity which causes the function to be run (by a .touch or .think usually, or by any of the engine-run functions ). In the case of the T_Damage function, "self" will be the entity which causes the damage, so for direct fire weapons like shotguns and axes it will be the player, but for projectile/model based weapons "self" will be the projectile entity.

Presumably the "Grunties" will have their .owner field set to the player who owns them, so something like this should work:

[code]
void(entity Grunty) OuchMessage1 =
{
sprint(Grunty.owner, #PRINT_HIGH, Grunty.netname, "

[OneManClan]

"self" changes all the time...<snip> ... for direct fire weapons like shotguns and axes it will be the player, but for projectile/model based weapons "self" will be the projectile entity.

Yes, yes, it all makes sense now. I got confused, because I saw this thing called 'self' declared globally, and I thought it was the players personal 'identity' throughout the code; yet it's more like a generic entity, used within functions as a 'local variable' almost (?). Though how multiple 'self's' could all run at the same time without conflicting is inconceivable to me, at this stage in my Quake C comprehension.

.<snip>..Otherwise the solution is to feed the "attacker" entity to your new function as a second parameter, and use that instead of "self".

Done, and it works perfectly!



thanks!


OneManClan

[frag.machine]

Try to imagine Quake's entities as C-like data structures holding info about every dynamic element in the game (a player, a monster, a rocket, a flesh gib). The game can have hundreds of entities (at least 600 in vanilla Quake, more in other engines). "self" is a pointer to the entity which the engine is currently processing, so it changes every interaction the game makes through the active entities list. "other" usually is a pointer to an entity that collided with (or used/activated) "self". "world" is a reference to the entity 0, which represents the loaded level. Keeping those concepts in mind helps a lot to understand what's going on in QuakeC.