DamageMobj can destroy the damaged actor if the death state sequence has zero duration. But Actor.target is a garbage collected member variable, i.e. it will be null, once the actor it points to gets destroyed.
This was originally done correctly in the C++ code but during the scriptification all those 'AActor *target = self->target' lines were removed because they looked redundant, but were not.
- use an enum type for ItemFlags, just like it was done for actor flags. Since the flag word is almost full it may soon be necessary to add a second one and then this kind of security check may become necessary.
This can see some heavy use in iterators where saving several hundreds of function calls can be achieved. In these cases, using a function to do the job will become a significant time waster.
- Changed the glass shards so that they do not have to override FloorBounceMissile. It was the only place where this was virtually overridden and provided little usefulness.
- made 'out' variables work.
- fixed virtual call handling for HandlePickup.
Zandronum added this so that it could restore the original Skulltag piercing armor capability with a specific puff, like it's done with the other zdoom railgun action functions.
- added new VARF_Transient flag so that the decision whether to serialize a field does not depend solely on its native status. It may actually make a lot of sense to use the auto-serializer for native fields, too, as this would eliminate a lot of maintenance code.
- defined (u)int8/16 as aliases to the byte and short types (Can't we not just get rid of this naming convention already...?)
- exporting the fields of Actor revealed a few name clashes between them and some global types, so Actor.Sector was renamed to CurSector and Actor.Inventory was renamed to Actor.Inv.
- refactored state bitfield members into a flag word because the address of a bitfield cannot be taken, making such variables inaccessible to scripts.
- actually use PNativeStruct for representing native structs defined in a script.
- fixed flag CVAR access. As it turned out, OP_LBIT is a bit messy to set up properly when accessing integers that may or may not be big endian, so it now uses a shift and bit masking to do its work.
- used the SpawnPlayerMissile call in A_FireBFG to test named arguments.
- implemented method calls from struct instances.
- optimized disassembly of VM call instructions to print the function's name at the end where it is more visible and does not need to be truncated. Also use the printable name for script functions here.
- implemented multiple-return-value assignment. Due to some grammar conflicts the originally intended Lua-inspired syntax of 'a, b = Function()' could not be done, so it's '[a, b] = Function()'
- made APlayerPawn::PlayAttacking(2) virtual script functions so that mods have better control over player animations. Note that these have no native base so they skip the templated interface for managing virtual functions.
- changed Dehacked weapon function lookup to check the symbol table instead of directly referencing the VM functions. Once scriptified these pointers will no longer be available.
- removed all special ATAGs from the VM. While well intentioned any pointer tagged with them is basically unusable because it'd trigger asserts all over the place.
- scriptified A_Punch for testing pass-by-reference parameters and stack variables.
This appears to be the only case where an actor was set to a state owned by a completely unrelated actor which would present some problems with state owner checking in AActor::SetState, so let's better get rid of it ASAP.
I believe the only reason this wasn't changed when all actors were exported 8 years ago was that old binary DEHSUPP lump.
