This was done to ensure that this code only runs when the thinker itself is fully set up.
With a constructor there is no control about such things, if some common initialization needs to be done it has to be in the base constructor, but that makes the entire approach chosen here to ensure proper linking into the thinker chains impossible.
ZDoom originally did it that way, which resulted in a very inflexible system and required some awful hacks to let the serializer work with it - the corresponding bSerialOverride flag is now gone.
The only thinker class still having a constructor is DFraggleThinker, because it contains non-serializable data that needs to be initialized in a piece of code that always runs, regardless of whether the object is created explicitly or from a savegame.
This should later be done for everything else as well, but the map loader should really be free of global dependencies ASAP.
Also replace TThinkerIterator<AActor> with FThinkerIterator globally because this only adds pointless type checks - with all actor subclasses being scripted this class has become redundant.
For some files that had the Doom Source license attached but saw heavy external contributions over the years I added a special note to license all original ZDoom code under BSD.
This is to ensure that the Class pointer can be set right on creation. ZDoom had always depended on handling this lazily which poses some problems for the VM.
So now there is a variadic Create<classtype> function taking care of that, but to ensure that it gets used, direct access to the new operator has been blocked.
This also neccessitated making DArgs a regular object because they get created before the type system is up. Since the few uses of DArgs are easily controllable this wasn't a big issue.
- did a bit of optimization on the bots' decision making whether to pick up a health item or not.
Both files can now be included independently without causing problems.
This also required moving some inline functions into separate files and splitting off the GC definitions from dobject.h to ensure that r_defs does not need to pull in any part of the object hierarchy.
This addresses the main issue with TObjPtr, namely that using it required pulling in the entire class hierarchy in basic headers like r_defs which polluted nearly every single source file in the project.
- disabled the Build map loader after finding out that it has been completely broken and nonfunctional for a long time. Since this has no real value it will probably removed entirely in an upcoming commit.
Needless to say, this is simply too volatile and would require constant active maintenance, not to mention a huge amount of work up front to get going.
It also hid a nasty problem with the Destroy method. Due to the way the garbage collector works, Destroy cannot be exposed to scripts as-is. It may be called from scripts but it may not be overridden from scripts because the garbage collector can call this function after all data needed for calling a scripted override has already been destroyed because if that data is also being collected there is no guarantee that proper order of destruction is observed. So for now Destroy is just a normal native method to scripted classes