I wish I had realized this the last time it came up - it would have saved me a lot of trouble.
But as it turns out, the more recent travelling code makes all of this completely unnecessary, working perfectly fine with deleting the player pawns along with the rest of the thinkers before loading the stored ones from the savegame (and getting rid of those in G_FinishTravel.)
And with a sane savegame format that does not depend on side effects from how the thinker serializing handled linking into the lists the old code was even harmful, leaving voodoo dolls behind.
I had the exact same effect when I tried to reshuffle some things for reliably restoring portals, but did not make the connection to interference between two mutually incompatible player travelling mechanisms that just worked by sheer happenstance with the original order of things.
- changed S_GetMusic to return a const pointer to the actual music name instead of a copy. The only thing this is used for is the savegame code and it has no use for a copy, it can work far more efficiently with a const pointer.
After testing with a savegame on ZDCMP2 which is probably the largest map in existence, timing both methods resulted in a speed difference of less than 40 ms (70 vs 110 ms for reading all sectory, linedefs, sidedefs and objects).
This compares to an overall restoration time, including reloading the level, precaching all textures and setting everything up, of approx. 1.2 s, meaning an increase of 3% of the entire reloading time.
That's simply not worth all the negative side effects that may happen with a method that highly depends on proper code construction.
On the other hand, using random access means that a savegame version change is only needed now when the semantics of a field change, but not if some get added or deleted.
- do not I_Error out in the serializer unless caused by a programming error.
It is better to let the serializer finish, collect all the errors and I_Error out when the game is known to be in a stable enough state to allow unwinding.
It turned out this may not be done automatically when opening the savegame - it has to be done later, after the pre-spawned map thinkers and all connected objects have been destroyed.
The object deserializer also has to be rather careful about dealing with parse errors, because if something goes wrong a whole batch of uninitialized or partially initialized objects will be left behind to destroy.
This means that no object class may assume that anything but the default constructor has been run on it and needs to check any variable it may reference.
- converted sound and canvas texture serialization.
- refactored file_zip, so that it can be used to load loose zip files and extract their compressed data directly.
- added handling to FSerializer to generate and consume compressed Zip file entries.
If all goes well this will allow saving savegames as Zips when the rework is done, which will make analyzing them a lot easier.
- fixed a few errors in the ACS module serializer.
- reordered a few things to how they were in the old code.
- optimized serialization of the level.Scrolls array to happen within the sector. This is to allow skipping 0-entries which normally constitute the vast majority of them.
- added sanity checks to prevent a savegame from being loaded with an incompatible map
- refactored a few things to simplify serialization.
- started work on main level serializer function.
Note that even with this change it is still not possible to unarchive any thinker pointers before the thinker list has been loaded as it would create broken lists.
Since decals may have thinkers attached this will crash when such a savegame gets loaded, because the thinker lists get reset in P_SerializeThinkers, deleting any thinker that already was processed.
I also added an error message that immediately aborts the save process if such an out-of-sequence thinker is attempted to be written out.
This obviously breaks savegame compatibility again...
- fixed: Visplane checks should only compare the plane flags that are relevant for rendering and mask out the rest.
- floatified FTransform and made the visplane checks a bit less verbose by moving the comparison as an operator into FTransform.
Note that this operator needs forceinline on Visual Studio so that it won't get called as a function.
Note that this required splitting P_SerializeWorld, because sector_t and FSectorPortal contain some actor pointers, for which the same rule applies: Portal linking can only be done after all sectors have been read, meaning it cannot be done along with the rest of the data in these structures.
Obviously such a change breaks savegame compatibility so the min. savegame version had to be increased again.
The old code kept the dead thinker, resulting in constant deletion and recreation of the subsector links and PolyBSP because the interpolation kept running.
Changed it so that the thinker is destroyed and the polyobject gets blocked by setting a new flag.
- some consolidation in p_map.cpp. PIT_CheckLine and PIT_FindFloorCeiling had quite a bit of redundancy which has been merged.
- čontinued work on FMultiBlockLinesIterator. It's still not completely finished.
This was to resolve some circular dependencies with the portal code.
The most notable changees:
* FTextureID was moved from textures.h to doomtype.h because it is frequently needed in files that don't want to do anything with actual textures.
* split off the parts from p_maputl into a separate header.
* consolidated all blockmap related data into p_blockmap.h
* split off the polyobject parts into po_man.h
